Oil's price

The Powers of Petrocracy -Fouad Ajami

Oil is the dictators' dream and their weapon, their means of escape from accountability and from the limits societies have drawn for rulers. The great democratic wave of the last quarter century has bypassed oil lands.

Oil underpins the Iranian dictatorship, frees it from the scrutiny of the bazaar...

With oil wealth, the tiny principality of Qatar has launched and sustained a television channel, Al Jazeera, that gives this small land a voice way beyond its demography and weight in the balance of nations. Right next door in Saudi Arabia, an antimodernist ban on women driving cars persists because oil grants that society waiver from the imperatives of economic rationality.
(U.S. News)