ïìSaudis Fight Militancy With Jobs: Private Posts Formerly Held by Foreigners Are Offered to Locals,î by Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 31 August, p. A1.

The House of Saud sees the writing on the wall and they're using the oil money while they still have it to buy off the potential unrest from hundreds of thousands of young Saudi males, "betting that greater economic opportunities in the kingdom will counter the rising Islamic militancy challenging the royal family."

It's a decent bet and the right thing to do, but it only delays the fall of the House of Saud. I don't say that as a criticism per se. I don't want the House of Saud to drop overnight. I want it to mutate into the House of Windsor slowly and with great transparency, accomplishing the feat in . . . say . . . a generation's time.

Today, just 13 percent of the Saudi workforce--private, that is--is actually Saudi. The rest are foreigners. Amazing no? It used to be that many Saudis entering the workforce could be put on the government's tab, but now that job pool can cover only about 10 percent, leaving 90 percent as potential recruits for bin Laden.

This is the Beverly Hillbillies effect coming to haunt them after three decades of the good life. Saudi Arabia had a small population three decades ago, but all that oil wealth led to an explosion of the population, to the point where today, more than a third of the entire population is under 15 years of age. So they went "overnight" (demographically speaking) from the "old mountaineer barely kept his family fed" to a trust-fund society where enough of the population had a decent enough life to seriously expand their ranks with kids. That gets you a bulging population, that gets you youth without solid connections to prosperous futures, that gets you the danger of unrest, and so now the old model of using guest workers is rapidly being altered to accomodate all those young males needing jobs.

But guess what? All those males entering the private sector and making lives within it are going to start demanding more pluralism from their government over time. If not on the dole, then they'll be more demanding, especially in terms of protecting their accumulated wealth.

You know where this is going. It's called a middle class that demands democracy, women's rights, etc.

Does this turn of events buy off potential radicals in the meantime? Yes. But it sets in motion a far more powerful economic trend that can't be suppressed by a secret police, and it's called rising expectations coupled with a sense of entitled ownership growing ever more free from state control.