STILL MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE SAUDIS, courtesy of George Will:

The House of Saud almost certainly is a dead regime walking. Saudi Arabia’s male unemployment rate is 30 percent. Its population growth — birth control is disapproved — is among the most rapid in the world (3 percent per year). Eric Rouleau, a French diplomat, writing in Foreign Affairs (“Trouble in the Kingdom”), says that since the overthrow of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia is the Islamic world’s most rigorous theocracy: “Universities require male professors teaching women’s classes to give their lectures through a closed-circuit one-way television system . . . 30 to 40 percent of the course hours in schools are devoted to studying scripture.” Furthermore, the marriage rate is dropping sharply:

“Unable to afford the traditional dowry, many young Saudi men are now doomed to a prolonged celibacy. At the same time, growing numbers of young women are refusing to marry men chosen for them by their families, men whom their would-be brides are not allowed to meet before their wedding night. As a result, an estimated two-thirds of Saudi women now between 16 and 30 years of age cannot, or will not, marry.”

As Will notes, “Sooner or later, and probably sooner, all this will meet its match in modernity.”

The most dangerous thing to the House of Saud is the notion that its continued existence is something short of inevitable. And that notion is widespread.