Niall Ferguson has an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times today. He presents what he thinks future historians will say about the events in the Middle East today.

“With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict — far bigger in scale than the wars of 1991 or 2003 — were in place.”

“The first underlying cause of war was, of course, the increase in the region’s relative importance as a source of petroleum. The rest of the world’s oil supplies were being rapidly exhausted, while the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand.”

“A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. In Iran, the social conservatism of the 1979 revolution conspired with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq war and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two-fifths of the population of Iran had been aged 14 or younger in 1995. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.”

Read this interesting article.