Bored young people with too much time on their hands: This is what the Saudis themselves regard as their seminal crisis, sown in the clash between borrowed modernization and threatened traditions—the root crisis from which a forest of others has sprung.
"The hijackers were a direct product of our social failures—a generation with no sense of what work entails, raised in a system that operated as a welfare state," a high-ranking government official told me. "We allowed them to grow up in pampered emptiness, until they turned to the bin Laden extremists in an effort to find themselves.