I would argue that in many regards the current rise of democratically minded protest is in spite of, rather than because of OIF and our GWOT efforts. I do believe that in the long run Iraq has the potential to provide a powerful example of how to evolve toward a form of effective democracy appropriate to this region, but that is a future benefit.

Consider that the countries where the populaces are rising up now, emboldened by the success of Tunisia and the US response, are also the countries that were:

1. The greatest source of foreign fighters to travel to Iraq and fight against the US under the AQ banner;

2. All (Libya new to that first list) U.S. Allies and all topping the charts of the "least free" nations on earth;

3. All countries where the US has focused CT efforts and capacity building efforts to help these regimes more effectively deal with the "terrorists" within their borders. One man's freedom marcher is another man's terrorist; and our GWOT focus has been decidedly in support of the perspective of these despotic leaders in that regard. Even Libya became an ally in our war on terror, and leveraged that to gain greater license in the suppression of her own people.

Sadly, the many populaces standing up to oppression are in large part doing it is spite of the US support to their governments, rather than because of the US support to concepts of liberty and democracy. Our words have been of the latter, but our actions have been firmly toward the former.

The key is how we move forward from here. How does the U.S. recover and refocus to lend stability to what could easily become a violent and chaotic process that is not in our best interest, or the best interest of the people involved. Dark forces will absolutely step up and seek to exploit these tumultuous conditions for their own purposes and we will need to be alert. Hopefully the CT guys are dialed up, because there is a good chance some of the real terrorists may break cover or get careless as they seek to grab this advantage. We need to scrub those target lists hard though, because I suspect there are many on the list that are nationalist patriots rather than international terrorists, and we do not want to fall back into the business of being manipulated by our allies to take care of their problems for them.

We live in dynamic times.