It seems everybody else is linking it, so I might as well link too.

The NYT finally, and grudgingly, admits that maybe, just maybe, Bush was right.

[T]his has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances.
....
Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

Read the whole thing here.

There is no real wonder here. The stasis was a result of accommodations made by corrupt and cynical western governments who preferred to do business as usual with tyrannies rather than pressure them to change. The fig leaf that covered this callous and cynical policy was the idea that no change could come until the Israeli/Palestinian problem was concluded to everyone's satisfaction. The economic situation that encouraged and perpetuated this hypocrisy was the fact that Europe was highly dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. Bush's freedom initiative was not about oil, but the opposition to it was.