One of my friends in Japan, whom I knew in the foreign aid development business, spent three years in Egypt developing products for export to Japan. The photo on the right shows a small store in a large department store where Egyptian products are sold.
As you can guess they include dates, various fruits of in the same family as dates, raisins as well as some versions of coffee and other spices.
This is a spectacular accomplishment in getting an export market for an Arab nation that has been producing these products for several thousand years.
The real shock is that in the contemporary world where there are tens of millions of Egyptians capable of doing something other than picking dates they are in fact not doing anything else. Egypt cannot even produce a pencil much less a bicycle. The same goes for the other Arab countries where minimal technical skills are nonexistent.
Yet we Americans, including major a part of our State Department, thinks these people can have some form of government that resembles the rest of the stable economic governments in the world.
We can be sure that an Arab country will not be a Singapore or Hong Kong because the Arabs still can't produce a pencil or a bicycle. And when I say the Arab world I also include Afghanistan.
I don't know about the Persians but we will soon find out if they can make pencils, bicycles or nuclear weapons.