Lessons From the King...

Despite being a small country stuck in the middle of a very large problem area, a number of lessons can be learned if we all took a step back to look at what is truly taking place here.
King Abdullah has managed to befriend every country in the Middle East. It is so friendly with Iraq that it practically got free oil. In return, and perhaps to provide some stability, the two countries are working on ways to bring water to perpetual warzone. Then, while Saddam was lobbing rockets at Israel and Iran speaks constantly about wiping Israel from the map (which, admittedly, is taken slightly out of context, but as our newspapers are so quick to realize, it sells), Jordan turns around and befriends the Middle East Pariah. The king manages to keep this friendship intact despite the majority of the Jordanian population being Palestinian, and most of the people choosing not to recognize Israel (my roommate just spoke with a man that told him to go visit Haifa, the most beautiful city in Palestine).
Meanwhile, as the world suffers from the oil crisis and Israel and the US biting at the bit to wipe Iran off the map, King Abdullah signs major contracts with European nations about creating nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Jordan is well-equipped with natural Uranium, and by constructing these reactors, it not only provides an example of what a Middle East country can achieve in terms of nuclear power while also placing itself in extremely good graces with the West, it is going to utilize the additional power to fuel water desalination plants to tackle the impending water crisis. With so much additional electricity, it will hopefully be in a position to even sell some of the power to surrounding nations.
Not to mention, while being surrounded by Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, with Egypt and Iran not too far away, the Jordanian government has devised a way to bring Islamist terrorism practically to a screeching halt (the 2006 al Qaeda attacks being the lone exception in recent years).
This of course is not saying that Jordan is not very much a third world country and is very much governed like a third world country. However, the one way to create a thriving nation is to make friends, figure out how to power the nation, and invite investment. King Abdullah has quite successfully been chipping away at all three.
With any luck, these successes will make the newly planned economic zones dispersed around the country just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps George Bush chose the wrong country to point as at the future of Middle Eastern democracy.