“Control of the Holy Places would become a matter of immediate contestation, as would a quarter of the world’s petroleum reserves. The type of interim regime most likely to effectively secure one would be especially likely to compromise security of the other.”

This why NRxn ^^ only people thinking

Prospective rebels have to see now in Saudi Arabia that resistance would bring tremendous loss with no promise of success. Syrian quality of life has been wrecked and for what? Egypt’s situation is the same as before, only with more brutal suppression of dissent. Libya is a mess. The publics of other Islamic autocracies must be thanking their lucky stars that they didn’t do Arab Springs themselves. I don’t think there have been any new ‘Springs’ in a while.

The Saudi Arabia article ends with “Trita Parsi is founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. ” I don’t know what that means but that doesn’t seem like a neutral source to me.

Paranoia would be defined properly as planning for “such and such” an unknown whose likelihood generally is considered close to nil. However, paranoid is often misapplied in the direction of ‘planning for the unknown as such’ – one could safely regard this as ‘healthy paranoia’.

Being armed, for instance, over most imaginable unknown difficult situations, ranks high as being of benefit and low as being troublesome. This isn’t merely carrying a gun of course, though usually the better the weapon you can carry (and use correctly – it is not a talisman) the greater benefit you get.

Of course, there are few actions other than prayer that one can take which have zero potential of having negative externalities.

For the hardcore forecast porn, it is hard to beat GEAB:
http://www.leap2020.eu/English_r25.html

Their forecasting methodology is rather cryptic, but even when they get things wrong they tend to at least get you looking in the right places.