Politics: The Middle East - sick man of Earth?

This article offers a somewhat sobering perspective on the Middle East. It's hardly an original sentiment - commentators have remarked for years that the Middle East is lagging behind even other parts of the Third World in terms of development, especially given the enormous amounts of oil and human capital that would seem ripe for exploitation.

I would argue that Sub-Saharan Africa is the least-developed place in the world, of course. The oldest enemies of humanity - war, disease, and famine - are definitely prevalent in that troubled region. But while political instability, epidemics, and infrastructure problems are all present to some degree in the Middle East, they don't fully explain why the cradle of civilization, and where the Ottoman Empire thrived some four to five hundred years ago, has become so unproductive.

Is this simply the natural outcome of a competitive global market? Will there always be "winners" and "losers" in the game of geopolitics? After watching a bit of "Star Trek" over the weekend, it'd be nice if such a utopia could exist, but thousands of years of human experience seem to dictate otherwise.