Iran Calls For Muslim Common Market

This is lovely. At the opening of the D-8 Summit of Developing Muslim nations, Iran has gone and called for a common market and also common foreign investment rules for the group. The nations in the D-8? Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Nigeria.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but pretty much all those nations, with the exception of Turkey, are not exactly what the average person would view as nations hostile to terrorists.

The idea itself of a common market is great and all, but what are they really going to trade? Oil? Sand? Terrorists? Weapons? Bomb-making techniques?

Look at the nations involved. Turkey and Pakistan are the two most economically advanced in the group, as such they have the least need for the group. Malaysia and Indonesia, if they could ever get the extremeists under control, would be in a similar situation. Egypt is mainly a tourist economy now, much to the chargrin of the fundamentalists. Nigeria seems to excel in fraud better than anything else (I found out today that the scam-mails they send out have an autoresponder that asks for more information. I have an autoresponder set up for the email for this site and I got an autoresponse to my autoresponse. But they obviously don't read too far as they think my name is "blog.")

Iran, I'm guessing, is simply looking for a common weapons market. It's getting tougher to smuggle in all that stuff needed to build the Bomb. Besides, Iran, more than any of the other nations, has a very limited export potential to their economy: oil, sand, or revolutionary extremeists. I'm guessing that Iran is simply looking to lower the tarriffs on imports so that they can free up more hard currency for their North Korean nuke techology.

And I'm not really sure how Bangladesh might fit into all this. I honestly don't know enough about the country to have any idea as to what they might produce or need, and therefore can't really determine how they might fit into a common Muslim market.

Maybe I shouldn't be so cynical about this. Maybe I should look for the positive, that Iran is making some of sort of attempt to act in a normal, responsible manner. But I look at the news that has been coming out of these nations over the last few years and I really have to wonder....