Middle East Has the Presence of Oil
For the U.S. and other Western powers, oil supplies are the only real interest in the Middle East, and most people in the region are well aware of this fact, and of numerous Western attempts to establish and support ‘friendly' authoritarian regimes like that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the monarchy in Jordan. Public opinion polls in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Pakistan actually show majority support for Western political and economic ideas, including democracy, but opposed U.S. foreign policy in general because they believed it to be motivated by control over oil supplies. None of this is new, and the West has been pursuing such policies since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, when Britain and France divided up the region between them. After World War II, the U.S. stepped in the void as these older empires declined, although it faced considerable resistance from nationalist movements in both oil and non-oil Arab countries.
Modern Architecture: Function, Innovation, and Social Change
The advent of modernity has wrought massive changes in human society. New forms of transportation and communication, for example, have changed the way people work, learn, conduct business and organize into communities.