No, Lebanon isn't Syria; my bad. Although Syria's been trying to "fix" that for decades no matter how many bodies it takes, and with Hezbollah in charge now they may have largely accomplished it, at least for the moment; I'll hope you'll excuse me if I don't expect Lebanon to sprout women in bikinis tomorrow or celebrate because Hezbollahs had a majority for a few weeks without imposing Sharia law.

The bottom line in all this is that whether or not anyone wants to admit a religious basis (most of that is just a rallying point for deeply religious people who might not otherwise support militance) DEMOCRACY is at or near the top of the list of "Western" values viewed with such disgust by most of the popular uprisings. Expecting them to PRODUCE democracy is like expecting Robespierre to crown the Pope King of France. The BEST I think we can hope for in most cases is a mostly non-violent theocracy, but since the same groups pushing for theocracies against secular nationalist governments are provincially conservative to the point of condoning and encouraging violence as penalty for transgressing religious laws even that might be unduly optimistic.

Egypt IS different than the rest of the Mid-East though; one of the oldest civilizations on the planet and a center of culture and learning for millennia, with strong if not always friendly Western ties. It may be that Egyptians as a whole can resist the surge the pull of theocracy, but if it does it will be the exception rather than the rule. Still and so, if the only brutally repressive regimes overthrown in the region wide grass roots democracy drive are pro-Western ones, while equally brutal but anti-Western tyrants in, say, Iran, grow stronger, is it really about democracy or just about expelling the Western influences of which democracy is chief?