Embracing Crisis in the Gulf (A background article) "To the extent that the United States endorses the status quo, it is complicit not only in the Gulf regimes’ efforts to quash citizen protest, but also in the redesign of Gulf security architecture by which crisis becomes the norm." See also The New Saudi Borgias
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51