What y'all are overlooking is the power of Islam, once a uniter, now a divider, in certain cases. F'rinstance in Iraq there was a peace imposed by terror of the leadership, the outnumbered Sunni leadership. The Shiite majority of Iraq are now flexing their numbers as the 'allies' attempt to install a working democracy. The first resort of the insurgency is to bomb the allies, but the second plan is to foment civil war between the two great ethnic groups, Sunni and Shiite. The Shiites resonate with the Shiite Iranians, but there is a huge ethnic divide there, between Arab and Farsi. Meanwhile, the other Arab states are controlled by governments that maintain themselves by one or another force variant. In the majority of cases the only way to oppose the government is through the religious subculture. The Wahhabis in Saudi, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria. So reform got mixed in with religion, not unlike what sort of happened with certain Catholic parts of South America.

There is a huge cultural conflict within the Arab mind, because the Arabs had a period of great cultural flowering and political/military/economic expansion, but have been sidelined for the last couple three hundred years. The reason is they have not processed religion down via the auspices of an enlightenment. The scientific method has not succeeded yet in overthrowing the religious temperament in the average mind.

There is a temporal disparity between the west and the east. Unfortunately, now that the east is getting the bomb, that disparity needs to be addressed. It's way more important than little old Israel, although Israel is like the canary in the coal mine.