I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear Islam blamed for the failures of the West as it intervenes in the Arab World. The West is failing for much more obvious reasons. The chief reason being that the Arabs have nothing to lose.
Consider things the way they are. The Arab world is separated into various kingdoms where the elites reap not just off the top but off of the whole. There are no industries in the Middle-East that take advantage of what should be very cheap energy costs. There is no naturally occurring middle class. There is only the middle class of hand outs from the elite structure.
I maintain that the powers that be in the West have always been afraid to encourage the Arabs to use their own oil. They have been afraid because it might choke their own economic miracle. I believe that this have proven to be a mistake.
Now that peak is certainly approaching the folly of this is obvious. The West has created a capricious monster that seeks to satiate its own self. No Arab state can be trusted to survive the coming tumult intact and friendly to the West. Even Saudi Arabia could turn on the West at any moment. Everywhere there is a populace that thinks Islam can give it what only the true and meaningful secularization of their states can give them.
Is it too late to industrialize the Arab world and in so doing give it a true middle class? Imagine an Arab world where in every country insurgents and agitators were put down by the people around them, in their own communities, because they posed too great a threat to their successful middle class way of life. Imagine an Arab world where the police forces adequately handled the problems and there was no need, and indeed it would be counter-productive, for the military to intervene.
Imagine an Arab world that rose up quickly to compete with China not because of any central planning but because of circumstances beneficial to it.
Imagine an Arab world that no longer had to arrive at political decisions based on the influence of its narrow pipeline of customers but rather based on a much more broken up and complex array of client countries that bought from it everything from aluminum to plastic.
Imagine a Palestine that could negotiate with Israel on an equal footing because of the jobs available to its residents in neighboring countries or in Palestine itself. Further, imagine a Palestine whose population no longer sought war with Israel because it knew that to do so would imperil everything that it had achieved to gain success. Conversely, imagine Israel no longer reliant on cheap Palestinian labor and the stronger for it.
Is it possible? I think so, but alas...