Saudi Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...

By one (admittedly biased) estimate, calculated 20 years after the attacks, the war on terror had cost $8 trillion, including hundreds of billions spent to bring about regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, where over 7,000 American military personnel bit the dust and 52,143 were maimed and injured.

The war on terror also led to a radical restructuring of government under the Patriot Act, which enabled unprecedented cooperation among federal intelligence agencies and expanded federal powers of electronic surveillance to uncover terrorist networks and their supporters. It gave the Treasury Department a new global reach to find and shut down the financial networks that paid for terror.

Here we are, 25 years later, though, and some would argue that, far from having eliminated support for Islamist terrorism, we see its sympathizers embedded in our politics.

This is particularly true among our college-educated elite today, but its roots go back to the days and months after 9/11 itself. We saw it first in the Left’s swift change of heart when it came to standing up to terrorism following the massacre of Americans on that day. After some initial enthusiasm for taking the fight to the enemy by stamping out al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and then seizing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it didn’t take much—a few photos from the rogue prison at Abu Ghraib—to convince the Left that a robust response to Islamist terrorism "wasn’t who we were." The Left soon decided that U.S. efforts were only creating more Lions of Islam than we captured or killed—or fueling Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
. The best way to defeat terrorism, the argument seemed to go, was to admit that we were in the wrong, as we had been since at least 1948.

That’s why it’s no good blaming the Bush administration alone for serial policy failures in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else. The Left was primed for defeat from the start, as epitomized by the B.O. regime’s decision to cultivate closer relations with the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
while distancing ourselves from Israel.