There will also be investment in customer support. In the Middle East this year we opened a call centre in Dubai, and will continue to invest here.

This will mean a tripling of investment in Russia and a doubling of investment in South Africa, and will continue over the next two years to gain the critical mass necessary for supplying customer needs.

I do not support peace in the Middle East. And I do not support Arafat. He is a stupid, incompetent fool!

Last year I traveled to the Middle East to visit with troops in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

It took from 1967 to 2003—over three decades—to build the big men. It took a decade—2003 to 2013—to destroy them. I suspect a new generation of big men will return. No people can tolerate chaos forever. Dictators will offer a way out and many of the exhausted and brutalized people of the Middle East will accept them, and I suspect Washington will as well.

This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn’t violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn’t the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city.