re: #227 laZardo

That’s what they use the money for. The “dictators” they don’t like just happen to be relatively secular.

We are going to see the same thing with Turkey: a choice beween a secular military dictatorship or an Islamist democracy. That is what we had in Iran under the Shah, in Iraq under Saddam, Egypt under Mubarak and in Libya under Qadaffi.

The Saudis are playing a tricky balancing act: remaining relatively secular in many ways but tolerating and even promoting fundamentalist Islamic teaching. It is about to backfire on them.