The 'Arab Spring': How long? It took Europe 1500 years .....

"... In less than four months, as uprisings have swept through the Arab world, we've seen that the once-comfortable Arab elites and their backers in Europe and the United States not only don't know what to do, they don't even know what to say. Regimes in Tunisia and Egypt toppled. Libya sank into civil war with NATO's desultory participation taking it toward stalemate, maybe even break-up. Bahrain erupted and Saudi Arabia intervened. Yemen continues blowing up and the dictator is finding himself utterly friendless while al Qaeda exploits the chaos. Syria is facing an uprising the likes of which it hasn't seen since the Hama massacre of 1982. Jordan is looking shaky. Palestinians are growing bitterly impatient with their own leadership and, now under bombardment from Israel, their anger continues to intensify. The Iranian regime is making mischief among the Arabs wherever it can, all the while worrying about a resurgence of the 2009 uprising that shattered whatever credibility its theocracy had left.
As this beat goes on, there's an ill-disguised hope in Washington and in European capitals that somebody can be stomped—a dictator here, a rebellion there—and somehow everything will calm down. (Does anybody in any Western capital, or in Israel, really want to see Bashar al-Assad go down in Damascus? The "what next" is almost too complicated and crazy to contemplate.) But no matter what Washington or Paris or London does, the unrest throughout the Arab world inspired by the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable seller on December 17 is going to continue.
In Egypt over the last few days a military and police crackdown on Tahrir protesters cost two lives, and ex-President Hosni Mubarak made a speech defending his record. This isn't so much democracy as déjà vu, and there's doubtless worse to come....
What we're watching right now is the painful creation of a new Middle East where, eventually, countries will be recognized as legitimate reflections of their people's national identities, and governance will have the legitimacy of popular support. As Fromkin pointed out, after the fall of the Roman empire, it took Europe more than 1,500 years, and many disastrous wars, to get that far..." (continue, here)