Pramit Pal Chaudhuri in the Hindustani Times calls it
"The second front was about the long-term eradication of the root causes of Al-Qaeda-type terrorism. All the terrorist-wallahs and Arabists the Bush administration tapped said the same thing: the reason educated Arabs sign up with bin Laden is a lack of democracy in their homelands. The antidote: open up the Arab world.

Two professors, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis, are the gurus of this belief. Their acolytes include Cheney and Rice. Completely overhauling the Arab world is a task roughly comparable to knocking the Soviet bloc, so the White House has preferred not to blow the trumpet on this. Instead, lesser officials like the State Department’s policy planning chief, Richard Haass, and Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, have served as mouthpieces. The second front warriors are pushing for the occupation of Iraq as they need a model Arab democracy. Iraqis are secular and are expected to welcome ballot boxes after decades of dictatorship. It also has enough oil to pay for its own revival.

Arab thinkers and Washington insiders say that another reason is that the US needs a lot of surplus petroleum handy for a showdown with the unrepentant cashbox of jehad: Saudi Arabia."

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There you have it...a democratic Arab world as an innoculation against the virus meme of Islamist terror AND a tactical mitigation of the Saudi grip on Western oil which is used to fund Islamist activities.

-p(good enough reasons to me)