The way I see it they owe all their ability to ship their prioduct, not just drilling for it, to us. When oil started to be drilled in the ME in earnest it was US companies, BP, and Dutch Shell that showed the bedouins how to do it and after30 years they have yet been able to catch on. Today still most of the engineering and skilled labor in not of arab makeup. All the transportation and logistic technology was handed to them by us and wetern Europe. Even today Chavez has "seized" assets of exploration and production companies and those assets are in decay. PEMEX is in panic mode because their assets are in such bad shape they are down to 25% efficiency and dropping once they removed gringos from the equation.

If not for us the ME really would be still in the 7th century.

Funny how every time the US ( and some other western nations ) is/are removed from any operation it tanks. Iran had a whole fleet of F-14's in 1979 and within 2-3 years of the overthrow of the Shah and booting us out those jets were grounded because of the lack of skill to keep them flying. Yeah I really want my technology offshored. Any company that does gets what they deserve once customer satisfaction tanks as in the case of many call center markets and "shop" software projects.

We get calls every month or so from a person of subcontinient orgin telling us how they can come in and evaluate or application and rewrite it in .Net in 6 months. We usually just say thanks, but no thanks and hang up last time I called BS and asked exactly how they could take a 15 year old feature rich fat-client app with over 500K lines of code and 190 tables and rewrite it in 6 months when we have a 3 year window and we know what we are doing. The line went dead.