On the "Arab Revolt," here's David Ignatius, with whom I share a profound wariness, based on a few hundred years of a seemingly inescapable pattern:
It's an easy revolution to like.... [However] History teaches that revolutions are always attractive in their infancy, when freedom is in the air and the rebellion seems spontaneous. But from the French and Russian revolutions to the Iranian uprising of 1979, the idealistic but disorganized street protesters usually give way to a manipulative revolutionary elite.
In this case, Islamic fundamentalists, perhaps. And as Christopher Hitchens peppers God Is Not Great throughout, with agonized despair: Religion poisons everything.