The rulers are the moderates. The Wahhabis who form the vast majority of Saudi Arabia's population aren't protected by the Saudi government - they tolerate the government as long as it adheres to Wahhabism. The moment that changes, the Saudi royal family will need to find permanent new digs abroad. Iran's Shah flouted the religious norms of his people, and paid the price by spending the rest of his life in exile. The Saudi government paid us $36b for Operation Desert Storm, which we would have had to fight anyway, to keep Saddam (or any given Arab leader) from unifying all of the Gulf region's oil fields under a single leader.
The amusing thing is that the neocon interpretation of Middle Eastern affairs is not all that different from the liberal one - the view is that the people are the salt of the earth and the rulers are scum who should be toppled. The traditional conservative view is that the people of the Middle East are scum and the only thing holding these evil troglodytes back is their rulers, who try to curb the worst excesses in order to avoid having to engage in continuous war until the end of time.
True statement. The only thing that part of the world has to offer is oil. That is the only reason they are not eating sand. They have nothing else and as long as they maintain their medieval psychology, they never will.
If the advanced world can break free from their grip on energy, we can just leave them to their own devices and let them kill each other as they choose to do so.
Perhaps that is why to autocrats in the Gulf are funding the environmental extremists in the West in trying to stop hydraulic fracking.