The loss of life is terrible, and the loss of stability is unsettling, and there are no assurances that the Arab World is headed for a better place, but there is a pretty good possibility that we will see a decrease in the threat of terrorism if people there begin to focus more on internal politics than on geopolitical concerns. So, from a completely selfish point of view, I am cautiously happy that there is turmoil and tumult taking place in an arc from Algeria to Yemen to Bahrain. Please let them focus on their own societies and not on how to bring down civilian aircraft. And, please let us be supportive of their efforts at self-governance without undue interference.

I really do believe that both terrorism as a strategy and political Islam as an ideology are born out of a degree of impotency. They are the tools of poor, powerless men. Democratic societies can develop their own lethal pathologies, of course, and our society has its problems. But no one has devised a better system than representative democracy and I doubt a better system is out there to be discovered. Certainly monarchies and dictatorships are inferior systems, provided that a democratic society can provide some tolerable level of law and order.

I’d like to whittle down the repressive regimes we call allies down to Saudi Arabia. And then I hope something transformative happens there that doesn’t cause a global economic or political nightmare. Because Saudi Arabia is the home of Mecca and Medina, it’s a place unlike any other. I’d like to think over time a bunch of democratic countries in the Middle East will produce people who get sick of visiting a wacko police state to fulfill their religious obligations and they will come up with some solution to the ridiculous House of Saud. What it might look like, I can’t say. But it won’t be anything like the travesty that exists there today.

Is Gaddafi dead yet?