Food crisis creates an opening for Muslim fundamentalists

       Expanding the ideas in my last post is this article in the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food18-2008may18,0,4822291,full.story

       That fact that the poor can't feed their families in Jordan is scary, but not nearly as scary as the fact that the Jordanian government can't feed its soldiers:

Many Jordanians say members of the army, the pillar of the regime, are being struck hardest by the crisis, unable to make ends meet on salaries of less than $10 per day.

'When you talk to the police officers and the army they're more and more complaining about everything,' said Mohammed Masri, an analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan.

Hadid, the tribal leader, recently received reports of security forces selling weapons.

'In the days to come, Al Qaeda won't need to bring weapons and bombs from outside Jordan,' Hadid said. 'They'll get it from here. The circumstances will allow Al Qaeda to penetrate the security apparatus.'

An unhappy army means a country ripe for a coup, which would be a disaster for Jordan, the Middle East as a whole, and the United States. King Abdullah II, a monarch though he may be, has been a force of modernization, education, economic growth and democracy in Jordan. The alternative, whether an Islamic government or a military dictatorship, would reverse 30 years of progress and threaten the peace between Jordan and Israel.
       Another unsettling undercurrent to this story is the fact that the hungry are blaming the United States. Being the world's only superpower, the folks in 2nd and 3rd world countries think that we can do whatever we want. We put men on the moon right? Surely we control the flow of food to Jordan. Naturally this means that when there's not enough bread, it's because the great leader of the United States has decided to punish Jordanians.
       Many Iraqis feel the same way. Five years after the invasion, many villages still don't have power and sewers. Unable to understand that even the great USA can't rebuild a whole country in five years, they think we're doing it intentionally and they're pissed. It seems that the USA has replaced Israel as the Arabs' default scapegoat.