Better still to be building a free Arab middle class, a middle class that leaders will listen to. If given the choice between spending their oil money on some scheme to topple the US, or spend it on themselves to improve their own lives, a free people will spend it on themselves. Only a dictator has the power to spend oil money any way he wants.
What a very nice and succinct appraisal.
Also true. Dictatorship provides the condititions in which terrorism can flourish and grow. In a free society, terrorists will always be marginal figures and outlaws.
Militant Islam and tyranny have long run deep in Arab society. If we can reform the political structure, as we are attempting now in Iraq, then the aggressively violent factions of the religious side will be crippled.
It's a bold plan. It's the cultural equivalent of an amphibious landing at Inchon. If it works, 'Islam' will be cut off from its totalitarian, anti-modern roots, and reduced to a normal, passive religion.