one big difference from 1989

This resembles 1989 closely in its euphoria and its sense of new beginnings. But there is the obvious difference that what happened yesterday is much more intellectually challenging to the West, which was flattered by 1989 but rebuked by 2011. We should be embarrassed to have encouraged and financed what turns out to have been a nation-sized mafia protection racket, and equally embarrassed not to have called much sooner and more vociferously for the end of it. This morning the Arab street, the target of so much patronizing worry over the past decade, looks more democratic than the democratic states.