Middle East - Irrelevent?

I ran across this very interesting article on the Middle East. The premise is simply that the Middle East is largely irrelevent, and not worthy of all the attention it gets.

I think I can agree with most of the article:

Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025.

It is true that oil producers are reluctant to use oil as a weapon now having increased their dependence on petro-dollars. The exception would be Iran, but they don't provide oil to the U.S. anyway. And it is also true that more oil is coming from non-Middle Eastern regions, albeit not necessarily stable areas themselves.

Reducing our dependence on the petroleum economy would be a good thing for many many reasons. Doing so would make the arguments made in this article even more true.

An area of disagreement I do have is the economic impact of disruptions in the area. Whether justified or not, disruptions in oil producing countries cause economic problems in the U.S. But it is also true that once the disruption is put into perspective (and adapted to), prices usually moderate.

Finally:

The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.

Certainly some interesting food for thought.