I believe the best post-Iraq strategy for driving reform in the Persian Gulf is to bring down the global price of oil - by developing clean power alternatives - and then to count on the forces of globalization from outside, and economic pressures inside, to push the leaders of these countries to change.  That's the combination of forces that stoked the reform process in Bahrain.  If the price of oil were half of what it is today, these regimes would not be able to resist political and religious modernization so easily.  As the John Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum observes: 'People don't change when we tell them they should.  They change when they tell themselves they must.

• alternative energy
• government
• oil addiction
• power
• change
• alternatives