The scenario I see playing out is that some nutjob gets a bomb from Iran or Pakistan, and they bomb a western city. (I'm hoping for LA because of the sociological impact and frankly because I don't live there. It's also fairly easy to get a bomb into the port of Long Beach without having to worry about passing Suez or Panama.) Once that happens we respond by reducing the non oil generating population centers of the Arab world to glass...then the people who are left decide to sincerely "rethink Islam". Unfortunately You are very much on point. One variation That could come into play if we had the political will would be to become energy independent by opening up our petroleum producing regions and continuing to develop other energy resources. This would reduce the flow of currency to the worst offenders causing them to replace their income by becoming productive. That would take spare time off their hands that they now use for their evil purposes. I don't think we realize what changes are being forced on Philistine because we have reduced their welfare payments. They might be moving toward a productive nation in order to eat.
Opps. Philistine = Palestine Not enough coffee.
I think that's a nice idea, and would be effective in principle, but as someone who worked in the energy trading industry for a substantial period of time, I think the idea of us becoming energy "independent" is unlikely even if we had the political will. Most of the technology that applies to so called energy independence doesn't come into play until oil is above 30 per barrel. And even so, just because we become independent doesn't mean china and Europe will... they will continue to by a fungible natural resource from the people most able to supply it, and where oil is concerned ... that's Saudi Arabia.SA has the lowest cost per barrel by a substantial margin... and there is no getting away from that. you can subsidize other technology, but that doesn't actually change it's net cost, only it's price to the consumer. And at the end of the day we simply don't have the resources to produce enough "low cost" energy to meet our needs.
One way that would make your scenario play out however would be if all those peak oil estimates (which I don't actually agree with) were to play out, and we simply use it all up. That would put us and our technology at a competitive advantage, and they could all go back to selling each other camels and rugs.