It is still striking, two months into the Great Arab Rebellion, how timorously many Westerners greet the region-wide uprising. Recognizing that democratic aspirations may be only a small factor in all the tumult, many would prefer to focus on the particulars of the revolts—the Shiite-Sunni split in Bahrain, the Palestinian-Jordanian tension in the Hashemite Kingdom, the outrageous corruption in Tunisia, the tribal jealousies and Orwellian bizarreness of Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, the haughty (and in private deviant) autocracy in Morocco, the too-duplicitous dictatorship of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the desiccated authoritarianism of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
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