Jeez, DF, I love your blog :) Excellent posts here as well! Thanks to everyone!!
You're right: it's not about oil, it's not about class or race. But what will spell doom for the Sand Sheiks is the death of Wahhabism. And that, and that alone, these bastards will fight to the last.
Wahhabism provides their support: a pliable populace, submissive and emotional, who are more than willing to commit any atrocity. They **are** cannon fodder, no more and no less. And why? Because the rise of wahhabism represented the death of logic for these people. And with the death of logic comes the inevitable: cults of personality.
The islamic world has failed to grow since the 14th century. It stopped in its tracks hundreds of years ago and what we're seeing now is nothing more and nothing less than a replay of the Last Crusades. The disconnect between the Arab world and the west was a conscious one by the Arab leaders of the time who preached an insular message to their people, encouraging cutoff. Arab secular logic, never completely removed from the mullahs' review, was not so much displaced as morphed into a sick, self-aggrandizing mess of fallacies. The ultimate upshot is that the Arab world never had a reformation as the West did, and as a result their capacity for self-examination has been squelched by a pervasive culture of victimization.
Want to stop the terrorists? Eliminate wahhabism. How do we do that? It's long process. Keep encouraging those "free-thinkers" in the Arab world who see something wrong with the conventional wisdom of their rulers. Support those who itch for positive change, for freedom. Give those who would force the muslims to examine their own actions in light of reality an outlet to distribute their message. It will take a few generations -- hell, look at how long it took Luther to get his message across -- but the end result will be worth the effort.
For now, for us, the immediate solution is to silence those muslim "leaders" who are the proponents of the violence and the victimization. Remove them. Permanently. (Dead men have trouble spending money.) And allow the reformation to begin.