Publicly or privately, the Saudis need to realize that a large part of their citizenry and a small but very rich and influential part of their rulers are extremists and need to be dealt with. To a certain extent, they appear to be realizing this; Drudge links to the article "Saudi clerics told to stop anti-U.S. sermons... ". (Both my readers found out about this two days ago. But I digress).

Shutting down the zealot preachers might work with the citizenry somewhat, but on the other hand it might just lead to secret mosques or groups being used to preach the now forbidden anti-Western messages.

The Saudis need to be very careful about not being too close to the U.S. and thereby precipitating a Khomeini-style revolution. And, they need to worry about being the victims of terrorist acts if they don't pay protection money. But, at the same time they need to fess up, as some in the administration are now suggesting. The plan outlined there sounds similar to my plan, only without the nuclear part. Excerpt:

"There may be tens of millions of dollars spent to fund terrorism, but there are hundreds of millions of dollars spent to propagate extreme, intolerant religious views that are highly critical of Western values, and that is our most bedeviling problem," a senior U.S. official said. "When money goes to the propagation of uncompromising, unforgiving, hostile views of other faiths, and they broadcast that, it is more likely than not the money is going to be used for violence."

This points out that in addition to having to throw our military and economic weight around to prevent the funding of terrorism and extreme religious views, we also need to provide an alternative. What we really need, and what we definitely aren't getting, is a PR campaign to sell the West and classic liberalism as either a good thing, or as something that must be tolerated.

Too much money and thought is spent on planning to invade this or that country or figuring out where terrorists might strike next and how to prevent it.

Too little money and thought is spent advancing the idea of Muslims tolerating non-Muslims and the West. Hollywood, instead of being a universally negative force, could perhaps pay for some of its sins by doing things like producing news inserts for its overseas movies. These would not be blatant propaganda, but instead would present an honest view of the West and attempt to sell the West or at least tolerance for it. As I pointed out previously, the Internet could help here too.

This campaign would have to be very subtle. I mean that as in "intelligently subtle," not as in "smarmy politically correct inoffensive crap subtle." Otherwise, it would be used against us: "Now you infidels are trying to poison our minds with your filthy propaganda, etc. etc."

It should also be accompanied by well-respected religious leaders who are either pro-West or at least tolerant of the West. If there aren't any such leaders, then we need to create them. They must discredit the zealots. If they're just bought and paid for Western shills, that will be discovered and this will backfire. So, they must be above reproach and they must be doing it from ideological grounds. Remember that these terrorist acts are justified by saying that such and such religious leader said that it was OK to attack American citizens. If there is no religious justification for terrorist attacks, the number of attacks will sharply decrease.

By the way, here are two articles on psyops in Iraq: one and two.

What I'm talking about is more PR than psyops. If we can sell Pepsi there, we can sell the West.

UPDATE: Tom Friedman suggests an internal ideological change as well. If you don't want to sign up for the NYT, see here.