And the phrase seems a fitting way to describe how a wealthy, global elite manages to bypass the often harsh inequalities that exist at many of the most expensive, members-only golf clubs around the world.

The well-to-do who can afford the expensive course fees only rarely recognize just how vastly different life is for those who toil on the grounds or carry the golf bags and live below the poverty line. GlobalPost set out to explore this divide in the highest realms of golf, from the Gary Player-designed course on the desperately poor outskirts of Myanmar’s capital Yangon to the Trump International Golf Club in a deeply divided West Palm Beach, Florida.

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CAIRO — The ominous backdrop of civil war in Syria has exposed a Sunni-Shia sectarian fault line that was trembling at the summit of Islamic nations, which came to a close Thursday.

The crisis in Syria, observers here said, has become a kind of proxy war in the Sunni-Shia divide.

It was clear at the two-day summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that Iran’s Shiite theocracy is unwavering in its support of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Led by an Alawite minority that is considered an offshoot of Shiite Islam, Assad’s regime stepped up its pounding of the opposition, even as the delegates of the 52-nation regional organization were convening.

Meanwhile, the predominantly Sunni nations of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that attended the summit made it clear they were putting their regional clout and their petro dollars behind the still ill-defined Syrian rebel forces, which are suffering enormous casualties in a war that has already claimed 60,000 lives.

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Under a ceasefire agreement brokered by the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, fighting was to stop at 6 A.M. Thursday and, according to the Associated Press, the first hours passed without any reports of major fighting.

The truce is to be followed by negotiations between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the Syrian opposition aimed at finding a political solution to the bloodshed that has claimed more than 9,000 lives over the last 13 months.

But as the sands of the diplomatic hourglass sifted down in the hours before the ceasefire agreement was set to take effect, it was hard to find diplomats or observers here at the UN or across the Middle East who believed it would hold.

U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed agreement Wednesday that “more resolute” action was needed by the UN Security Council if the ceasefire agreement was truly going to hold.

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Thick 19th century concrete walls, barbed wire and gun turrets protect not only the sprawling, historic military base and the prison where Bales sits in solitary confinement, but also the very center where the American military has defined its counter-insurgency strategy in the post-9/11 era.

Not far from those walls of the military prison at Leavenworth is the Combined Arms Center, where Gen. David H. Petraeus and a team of military scholars wrote the doctrine for counter-insurgency and where field commanders train in what is known as the Center for Lessons Learned.

And there are many lessons to learn from the story of Bales himself.

Sgt. Bales, a 38-year-old father of two who was twice wounded in combat over the course of four deployments, was transferred yesterday form Kuwait to a cell in the prison at Leavenworth after being charged in last Sunday’s killing of 16 Afghan villagers, 9 of them children.

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