The stunningly quick fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt had many observers in the West reaching for familiar historical analogies of momentous upheaval: the fall of the Berlin Wall or the revolutions of 1848. Those living in the Arab world likewise had their own set of analogies to add to the mix, from the Egyptian nationalist uprising of 1919 to the set of upheavals in the decade after the 1948 war that toppled a feckless republic in Syria and ineffectual monarchies in Egypt and Iraq -- and threatened the remaining Arab regimes.
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