Jesse Walker finds attempts to brand the Tunisian revolt as a “Twitter” or “Wikileaks” revolution to be very unhelpful:

Debating whether their presence makes this a “[fill-in-the-blank] revolution,” by contrast, seems pointless.

Yes, “Twitter revolution” is a silly simplification — like calling the truck blockades of the ’70s a “Citizens Band revolution.” Social media were a part of the uprising, but social media did not cause the uprising, social media were not the only tools used in the uprising, and social media were not the only important media in the uprising. And Twitter was hardly the only significant social media platform at work. As for WikiLeaks — well, indications right now are that it played at best a minor role in what went down, though the possibility that it played any role at all seems worthy of our attention. Not because that will help us understand the big picture with regard to Tunisia, but because it may help us understand the big picture with regard to WikiLeaks.

But saying “this wasn’t a Twitter revolution” is a simplification too, because it makes it sound like Twitter wasn’t part of the picture. As Juan Cole points out, “Revolutions are always multiple revolutions happening simultaneously.” I’m far more interested in how those insurrections fit together than in how they’ll be branded.

There is no question that protesters made use of Twitter, and it is also quite clear that Twitter was a valuable tool for disseminating information about the revolt, but that doesn’t make the revolt a “Twitter revolution” except in the very narrow sense that more people learned of what happened in Sidi Bouzid more quickly than they would have otherwise. Arguably, this accelerated the escalation and spread of the protests, but there seems to be general agreement that the trigger was Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the real causes were widely-shared economic and political grievances. Labeling something a “Twitter revolution” seems to trivialize what we’re talking about, as if other nations’ political struggles can be defined by the technologies and websites that happen to be trendy elsewhere.

As for the “Wikileaks revolution” claim, I have to agree that Wikileaks’ role was minimal. Everyone who was demonizing Wikileaks last week for undermining the Zimbabwean opposition must be feeling rather stupid this weekend if they have given the matter any thought, since Wikileaks’ supporters can put forward a somewhat more plausible case* that the cables that it leaked catalyzed resistance to Ben Ali’s regime. Of course, the leaked cables merely confirmed in specific detail what Tunisians already knew: their government was a deeply corrupt police state dominated by Ben Ali and the Trabelsi clan. Tunisians didn’t need Wikileaks, and Wikileaks didn’t do much more than confirm the obvious about Ben Ali and the Trabelsis, but no one can say that the leaks did the protesters any harm.

* That is, the pro-Wikileaks argument regarding the Tunisian revolt is somewhat more plausible than the absolutely dense claim that Wikileaks endangered Morgan Tsvangirai.

Update: As Dan Murphy at The Christian Science Monitor says:

Ben Wedeman, probably the best TV reporter employed by an American channel (he works for CNN) when it comes to the Arab world, is in Tunis and had this to say about Ben Ali’s stunning fall yesterday, the WikiLeaks theory, and the public fury that amounted to the first succesful Arab revolt in a long time: “No one I spoke to in Tunis today mentioned twitter, facebook or wikileaks. It’s all about unemployment, corruption, oppression.”

The weakness of Tunisia’s Islamist opposition also makes it difficult to forecast how other Middle Eastern regimes would react to similar protests. It is unthinkable, for example, that Mubarak would not choose to crack down more viciously on protesters given the very real possibility that, if overthrown, Egypt would become an Islamist state. Given the unique nature of Tunisian society, observers hoping that Ben Ali’s fall will portend a similar fate for other Arab autocrats may be left waiting a lot longer than they might now think. ~Michael Koplow

As I was saying yesterday, Islamism is not what anyone needs to worry about in Tunisia. That could suggest that Tunisia will move towards something more closely resembling representative government more quickly and with less opposition from the military. The existing state institutions will not feel obliged to quash the political goals of the majority for secularist ideological reasons. They might decide to quash those goals for reasons of preserving economic privileges and power, but that’s a different story. The Kemalist and early Arab nationalist states were secular and modernizing states, and they were necessarily authoritarian because the broad majority of their nations were reluctant to embrace secularization and modernization to the same degree as the nationalist leaders. Tunisia does not have the same secular-religious tension that has defined the evolution of the Turkish and Arab nationalist republics, so as Koplow says the nature of Tunisian society is not at stake in the same way that it might be in other Arab countries.

This observation of Tunisia’s uniqueness undermines to some extent what Doug Saunders wrote today and what I wrote yesterday. Here’s Saunders:

Indeed, what can we say? In the past, we’ve said one of two things: First, that this form of leadership is part of Arabic culture and tradition and is, therefore, broadly accepted by Arabs in ways it wouldn’t be by anyone else. Second, that the democratic option would inevitably lead to rule by radical Islamists, and that the besuited fellows whose pictures adorn the wall of every room are the alternative.

That’s true, but what if at least one of those two “myths” is true in most other cases? Yesterday, I said, “If you are strongly committed to the idea that the only alternative to Arab authoritarian regimes is Islamist radicalism, Tunisia creates a problem for you.” Yes, it creates a problem for people making this argument, but it may be one that is overcome more easily than I originally thought. If Tunisian Islamism isn’t a factor in Tunisian politics right now because of almost fifty-five years of secular authoritarianism, and if Tunisia is fairly unique in this regard, that could oddly enough use the Tunisian example to argue for preserving the status quo elsewhere.

The unrest in Tunisia has continued. Ghannouchi’s attempt at a “soft coup” has been rejected, and the speaker of the parliament, Fouad Mebazaa, is currently acting as interim president. He has reportedly authorized negotiations for the formation of a national unity government. The BBC has its live-blog up again for today. Now that Ghannouchi is out and the “temporary” absence of Ben Ali has become officially a permanent departure, presidential elections are required to be held within 60 days.

As Nathan Brown explains on Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel, holding elections so quickly is a boon to the allies of the old regime, as they will have to take place according to the constitutional structure set down by Ben Ali:

But Article 57 — if that is what is used — is a very mixed blessing for the opposition. The problems start when you read the fine print. The presidential elections have to be held according to the current constitutional provisions, and those allow only the Potemkin parliament (and a few other officials) the ability to nominate candidates. And while the acting president is serving, no constitutional amendments are allowed. In other words, invocation of Article 57 kicks into gear a process that was carefully designed for Ben Ali. It is designed for a figure handpicked by current top leaders, not for a truly open election.

Marc Lynch discusses the role of new media, including satellite television, and adds these observations:

I’d point to one other aspect of this which often gets overlooked. Al-Jazeera and the new media ecosystem did not only spread information — they facilitated the framing of the events and a robust public debate about their meaning. Events do not speak for themselves. For them to have political meaning they need to be interpreted, placed into a particular context and imbued with significance. Arabs collectively understood these events quite quickly as part of a broader Arab narrative of reform and popular protest —the “al-Jazeera narrative” of an Arab public challenging authoritarian Arab regimes and U.S. foreign policy alike. Events in Tunisia had meaning for Jordan, for Lebanon, for Yemen, for Egypt because they were framed and understood within this collective Arab narrative. From al-Jazeera’s talk shows to internet forums to the cafes where people talked them out face to face, Tunisia became common focal point for the Arab political debate and identity.

Michael Koplow explains why Islamism is not a significant factor in the Tunisian revolt:

Unlike in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and most other secular Arab autocracies, the main challenge to the Tunisian regime has not come from Islamist opposition but from secular intellectuals, lawyers, and trade unionists. The absence of a strong Islamist presence is the result of an aggressive attempt by successive Tunisian regimes, dating back over a half-century, to eliminate Islamists from public life. Ben Ali enthusiastically took up this policy in the early 1990s, putting hundreds of members of the al-Nahda party, Tunisia’s main Islamist movement, on trial amid widespread allegations of torture and sentencing party leaders to life imprisonment or exile. Most influential Tunisian Islamists now live abroad, while those who remain in Tunisia have been forced to form a coalition with unlikely secular and communist bedfellows.

The nature of the opposition and the willingness of the Tunisian government to back down are not coincidental. If it had been clear that Islamist opposition figures were playing a large role in the current unrest, the government would likely have doubled down on repressive measures. The Tunisian government is rooted in secular Arab nationalist ideology and has long taken its secularism and its nationalism more seriously than its neighbors. Habib Bourguiba, Ben Ali’s predecessor and the father of the post-colonial Tunisian state, took over lands belonging to Islamic institutions, folded religious courts into the secular state judicial system, and enacted a secular personal status code upon coming to power.

Via Scoblete, George Brock is largely correct in his assessment of why the apparently successful Tunisian uprising has received so much less attention in the U.S. than the various “color” revolutions and the Green movement in 2009. The holiday season timing may not have helped, but December was the month when the Orange protests were taking off in Ukraine in 2004 and that didn’t seem to stop obsessive and cheerleading coverage on behalf of Yushchenko in the Western media.

I would add that it isn’t just Tunisia’s relatively lesser geopolitical significance that has kept its uprising from gaining more attention in the U.S. It’s also that Tunisia’s uprising is not very useful ideologically or strategically for most Americans. The Tunisian uprising doesn’t fit the neat schemes that have been applied to various “people power” movements in the last ten years. It also tends to blunt Western outrage towards authoritarian governments elsewhere in the world that one of the bloodiest crackdowns on protesters in recent years has come at the hands of a pro-Western client government, so it might be that many of the pro-Green enthusiasts are just trying to avoid the entire subject. In a related way, the excesses and foolishness of a lot of pro-Green enthusiasts and the subsequent faltering of the Green movement may have left Western observers chastened enough that they were unwilling to say anything about the Tunisian protesters for fear of being made to look foolish again.

If you are strongly committed to the idea that the only alternative to Arab authoritarian regimes is Islamist radicalism, Tunisia creates a problem for you. If you believe that Westerners’ actively promoting political reform in the Arab world is the only way that it will ever happen, the Tunisians seem to have just proved you wrong. If you have spent the last two years berating the Obama administration for neglecting democracy promotion, Tunisia offers something of a rebuke that U.S. advocacy or lack of advocacy has any impact on the internal politics of authoritarian states. Put another way, more significant internal political change has taken place in an Arab country during the first half of one term of the “negligent” Obama administration than occurred during the entire Bush administration. This is purely coincidence, and has nothing to do with Obama, but it makes a mockery of all those who have tried to pin the crackdowns elsewhere around on the world on Obama’s supposed indifference.

Administration critics might say that the administration abandoned a reliable ally by not backing Ben Ali more forcefully, but some of them have spent so much time building up their narrative that the administration is allegedly “pro-dictator” that it wouldn’t work. Unlike the other governments targeted by both spontaneous and semi-staged popular protests, Ben Ali’s regime had good relations with western Europe and the United States, so at best the outcome of the uprising is to maintain the status quo. Ben Ali was already deemed “pro-Western” for good reason and was interested in integrating Tunisia economically with the West, so his downfall does not serve the convenient morality tale that economic and political reform must go hand in hand.

While it is clear that Ben Ali and his family wore out his welcome with the Tunisian people it doesn’t necessarily mean what comes after will be an improvement. ~Aaron Goldstein

This is always true. Sudden political change often produces worse outcomes than keeping the status quo in place. Goldstein then makes a much less plausible argument:

The thing that has caught my attention about the events in Tunisia is the support it has received from al Qaeda. If elections are not held in a timely manner or if the results of said election are not deemed acceptable by the new administration an opportunity could present itself for al Qaeda to assert its influence and impose Sharia law [bold mine-DL]. Should such a development come to pass then it could have grave implications not only in the Middle East but for the United States and the West. We could have an Afghanistan in Africa.

First of all, the main question is not whether the so-called Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb will try to “assert its influence,” which is minimal, and the group is in no position politically or militarily to impose anything on Tunisia. The real question is this: is Ghannouchi’s interim government going to be accepted by the protesters as an acceptable caretaker until new parliamentary elections? If not, and if the protests escalate against the entire regime associated with Ben Ali, there is no telling what might happen next, but a military coup becomes more likely.

AQIM is not a significant force in Tunisia, and according to the CFR profile of the group it is based and operates mainly far to the south in the Sahara along the border of Algeria and Mali:

AQIM’s activities were previously based along Algeria’s Mediterranean coast, but security crackdowns by the Algerian military have forced the group into the largely ungoverned Sahara desert area of Mali, and along Algeria’s northern border. AQIM relies on local communities of the Sahara for sanctuary. At times, local elders of such communities have acted as intermediaries in talks that have led to the release of hostages. However, AQIM’s base in Mali is by no means a safe haven. In June 2009, Malian security forces killed seventeen militants during a raid on an AQIM base near the town of Timetrine.

This doesn’t definitely mean that they couldn’t try to cause some disruptions and launch some attacks inside Tunisia, but they are primarily an Algerian-based group whose focus has been on combating the Algerian government. The group seems to be taking advantage of the upheaval in Tunisia to insert itself into an event that is garnering international attention, and it does not represent Tunisian Islamists. The main Tunisian Islamist movement is the An-Nahdaparty, and on the whole “Tunisian Islamists have been either imprisoned and tortured, or forced into exile.” Tunisia is one of the countries where we needn’t worry very much about the Islamist nature of opposition to the regime, because the opposition is largely composed of entirely different groups. The remnants of An-Nahda are not very politically significant, and radical jihadist groups from outside the country are even less so.

When the United States does not advocate strongly for freedom, other democracies tend to retreat and autocracies feel emboldened. ~The Washington Post

Not only is this a ridiculously self-important claim to make, but the two don’t have any direct relationship. Authoritarian governments were gaining strength throughout the last decade when the U.S. was “advocating strongly” and when it wasn’t. Freedom House has been tracking ongoing declines for several years during both the Bush and Obama administrations*. As the Freedom in the World 2011 report states:

According to the survey’s findings, 2010 was the fifth consecutive year in which global freedom suffered a decline—the longest period of setbacks for freedom in the nearly 40-year history of the report.

Presumably the Post editors believe that Bush “advocated strongly for freedom,” and on his “watch” there were brutal crackdowns on protesters in Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Pakistan, and military coups in Thailand and Bangladesh**. Obama has been less enthusiastic when it comes to hectoring other governments on these issues, and on his “watch” there have been brutal crackdowns on protesters in Iran, Egypt, Belarus and Bahrain, and power-grabs by the ruling party in Hungary. There has also been the first successful deposition of an Arab ruler on account of popular protests. Of course, that seems to have had nothing to do with the U.S., and it is doubtful that the crackdowns would not have happened had Obama lectured their governments more often. All of these can be understood mainly by looking at the specific conditions in each of these countries. American advocacy or lack of it has nothing to do with it. Our government’s impact on the internal politics of most countries is understandably minimal, and it is unreasonable to expect that the direction of political developments all around the world somehow hinge on what U.S. officials do or do not say.

* Freedom House rankings are not without their own problems. For example, their net change in the aggregate score for 2003-2007 shows Kyrgyzstan improving its score at a time when it had come under Bakiyev’s authoritarian rule. The net change for 2007-2011 shows Kyrgyzstan losing ground despite Bakiyev’s removal and his replacement by something approaching an elected, constitutional government.

** Arguably, both the Thai and Bangladeshi coups were extraordinary but appropriate responses to deeply corrupt, abusive democratic governments, but they were coups all the same.

The point of taking a stand is this. That girl, and hundreds of millions like her in this region, have heard the United States say that we don’t take sides–that we don’t have a particularly strong feeling about scenes like this. That we insist upon freedom of expression for ourselves, but don’t much see why it should be important to her.

Does my government seriously imagine that she–and everyone like her–will forget that we didn’t take her side? ~Claire Berlinski

Something that has been lost in this discussion is the recognition of how extraordinary it is for the U.S. government to have taken a neutral position when a friendly autocratic Arab government comes up against enormous popular opposition. It would have been unsurprising if American officials had supported Ben Ali’s regime and called for calm. In other circumstances in countries where the U.S. has more perceived security interests at stake, our Secretary of State might have gone so far as the French Foreign Minister did earlier this week to offer assistance in restoring order. As it was, the U.S. stake in who rules Tunisia is relatively small, so there was nothing to be lost by not taking sides. This position turned out to be wiser than I originally guessed.

Ben Ali and his family are now out of power, and publicly the U.S. had no hand in any of it. That could well be the best outcome for Tunisia and the U.S. In any case, the Tunisian protesters have evidently succeeded in forcing Ben Ali out without U.S. support, which can only help make their success appear more legitimate in the eyes of Arab publics elsewhere. There was no reason for the U.S. to insert itself publicly into the dispute, and more important the Tunisian protesters apparently did not need the U.S. to become publicly involved. Tunisians attended to their own affairs, and successfully deposed an autocrat. Instead of dwelling on our failure to meddle publicly, let’s take some satisfaction that Tunisians didn’t need Americans to “speak out” or “take a stand.”

Update: Here is some information on the prime minister who has taken over for the moment as interim president.

Second Update: In some last-minute damage control, France has refused to grant Ben Ali asylum and won’t let him land in Paris. He is reportedly off to the Gulf to find a government that will take him in.

Third Update: Mona Eltahawy reports:

But others saw encouragement from Washington’s reticence. U.S. leaders are “supporting us with their silence,” a Tunisian told me on Twitter. “If they say anything, we will lose.”

The BBC has been reporting events from Tunisia live. This came across just a few moments ago:

1745: President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has stepped down. Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi has taken over as interim president.

1736: Two sources close to the government confirm to the AFP news agency that President Ben Ali has left Tunisia.

1735: Air France has temporarily suspended all flights to Tunis due to the state of emergency and the closure of air space.

1733: Sources tell al-Jazeera TV that President Ben Ali has left the country and that the army is in control.

So the riots have successfully forced Ben Ali and his family from power. It remains to be seen if the rest of the regime survives, but it seems likely that without Ben Ali as the focus of public anger the interim government might be able to quiet things down. The “Tunisia scenario” looks remarkably like the overthrow of Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan, and somewhat like Kyrgyzstan the Tunisian riots exploded out of a combination of resentment against corruption in the ruling family, rising prices, and authoritarian government. We can hope that Tunisia will not be wracked by the factional violence that plagued Kyrgyzstan after Bakiyev’s fall.

If the Obama administration decides to tacitly or overtly side with the protesters and Ben Ali’s regime falls, will these Washington voices for Arab democracy applaud the change or will they attack Obama for selling out a secular ally? ~Marc Lynch

Lynch says this is a genuine question, but he must know the answer to this. It is a perfect “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for administration critics. If the administration remains publicly neutral and calls for an end to violence, they will attack Obama for his passivity and silence, as they did during his correct handling of the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election. If the administration openly sides with Ben Ali’s opponents and calls for his resignation, administration critics will condemn Obama for undermining U.S. allies, destabilizing North Africa, and creating an opening for the Islamists that Ben Ali has effectively suppressed. If the administration defends the Tunisian government and tries to calm the situation down behind the scenes, the critics will berate Obama for his indifference to the suffering of the people and his lack of belief in American principles, and so on.

Since Obama will probably get no credit from his democratist critics no matter what he does, he and his administration should continue their public neutrality, use what influence they and the French have with Ben Ali to urge him to continue de-escalating the conflict, and insist publicly that any transition of power should be done in an orderly and peaceful fashion. Emphasize that the U.S. and France will not recognize any government that comes to power through the violent overthrow of the regime. The administration could build on Ben Ali’s offer not to stand for re-election to propose that the transition take place after the next election. In that way, the administration might be able to contribute to easing Ben Ali out of power that stands a chance of avoiding chaos, immediate revolution or a military coup.