The average GDP per capita (PPP US$) in high-income OECD countries is $30,181, according to the United Nations Development Program (cf. <http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_ESP.html>).
Give each and every citizen and resident in the Middle East $30,181 per year, and let them live on that income for a couple of decades, and I'd bet they'll be all as liberal and pacific as average citizens and residents of high-income OECD countries, and all they care about will be sex, sports, and reality TV. :-> But liberals and neoconservatives don't want to give that kind of money to the Middle East populace, and leftists, some of whom would if they could, don't have the power to do such income redistribution and liberal social engineering from above.
Since we either can't or don't want to redistribute income and wealth globally, we'll have to live with the fact that a majority of people in the world will be illiberal for a foreseeable future. Some of the illiberal people are the kind of people we can live with; others aren't. We have to draw the line correctly, though. I submit that we can live with Hamas, Hizballah, the Iranian government, and so on (the rational, modernizing wing of Islamists), but we can't live with international jihadists of an apocalyptic tendency (for the lack of a better term -- those whom Chris has been calling Salafists, Wahhabists, etc., the kind of people who behead people like Tom Fox and Daniel Pearl, bomb a mosque in Samarra, take kids hostage in Beslan, etc.). The latter must be suppressed, by any means necessary. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>