2. Part IV Chapter 20: The Shattered belt Arabs are fundamentally redefining their region in ways not seen in close to a thousand years. From the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, Damascus under the Umayyad dynasties and Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate ruled from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans. For centuries afterward, Arabs were fractured and dominated by Turks, Persians, and Europeans. Today the Arab world has its first chance in a millennium to determine its natural order.
3. Part IV Struggling with self-definition within suspiciously straight colonial borders, few Arab states command national loyalty; their people are more residents than citizens. The Arab realm is undeniably a second world zone because unlike Africa and South Asia, it possesses all the natural resources, money, labor, and talent to develop itself. Arabs will not be left out of globalization; they are shaping it.
4. Part IV Chapter 24: The Former Iraq:BUFFER, BLACK HOLE, AND BROKEN BOUNDARY When Baghdad ruled the Abbasid caliphate from the eighth to the tenth centuries A.D., it was the mightiest of Muslim empires, stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. After World War I, Britain lumped together three Ottoman zones that had been independent for centuries. The Iraq War exposed the United States as a superpower whose intelligence does not match its aspirations. Numbed by the grotesque violence of the civil war, ordinary Iraqis have been too proud to show that they are past the breaking point.
5. Part IV Despite it all, Iraq still cannot be considered part of the third world. Even Iraq’s poorest districts have adequate housing, and some neighborhoods have been spared violence simply because hey are poor. America may feel it has made the region better off by ousting Saddam, but that is not something it ever had the power to judge. When Iraq’s civil war ends, the region may have lost a country. Kurds will undoubtedly have all the freedoms they deserve- the only question is when.
6. Sources Khanna, Parag. The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2009. Print.