An interesting discussion has already broken out over whether Tunisia should be considered a "Twitter Revolution" -- a far more interesting and relevant discussion than whether it was a "WikiLeaks Revolution" (it wasn't). I've seen some great points already by Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, Luke Allnut, Jillian York, and others. I'm looking forward to being one of the social scientists digging into the data, where I suspect that both enthusiasts and skeptics will find support for their arguments. For now, I would just argue that it would be more productive to focus more broadly on the evolution of the Arab media over the last decade, in which new media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums and blogs work together with satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera to collectively transform the Arab information environment and shatter the ability of authoritarian regimes to control the flow of information, images, ideas and opinions. That feels like a sentence which I've written a hundred times over the last decade… and one which has never felt truer than the last month in Tunisia.

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Like virtually the entire Arab world I have spent the morning glued to Al Jazeera, watching the absolutely riveting scenes unfolding. The images of massive crowds in the street, soldiers embracing protesters, and outbursts of violence remind me of nothing more than the demonstrations in Beirut in 2005 which similarly captured the imagination of the entire Arab world -- though in that case, they captured the entire world's attention, whereas Tunisia's protests have received far less attention. But make no mistake: For Arab publics and for Arab regimes, this is a defining moment as powerful as those Beirut moments and, if it succeeds in bringing about change in Tunisia, then likely far more significant in the long run. I can barely stand to leave Al Jazeera and go to my meetings.

Events are moving fast. Ben Ali has reportedly fired his entire government and promised elections within 6 months, after vowing to end media censorship the other day. A State of Emergency has reportedly been declared. It doesn't look like it's going to work -- these crowds do not look likely to dissipate for the promise of elections sometime in the future. The only path forward I can see which doesn't involve significant bloodshed and chaos is a "soft coup," with a caretaker government and promise of rapid move to elections. I hope that somebody -- the Obama administration, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President Sarkozy -- is ready to make that quiet phone call and tell Ben Ali that his service to his nation has come to an end. This could end well … or it could end bloody.

UPDATE, 2:15 p.m.: Wow. In the time between posting this and coming back from my meetings, it came to a head. Ben Ali out of the country, PM Ghanouchi taking power, presidential elections promised. Amazing.  

Barely a month goes by without a Washington Post editorial bemoaning Egypt's authoritarian retrenchment and criticizing the Obama administration's alleged failure to promote Arab democracy. But now Tunisia has erupted as the story of the year for Arab reformers. The spiraling protests and the regime's heavy-handed, but thus far ineffective, repression have captured the imagination of Arab publics, governments, and political analysts. Despite Tunis's efforts to censor media coverage, images and video have made it out onto social media and up to Al Jazeera and other satellite TV. The "Tunisia scenario" is now the term of art for activist hopes and government fears of political instability and mass protests from Jordan to Egypt to the Gulf.

But the Post's op-ed page has been strikingly silent about the Tunisian protests. Thus far, a month into the massive demonstrations rocking Tunisia, the Washington Post editorial page has published exactly zero editorials about Tunisia. For that matter, the Weekly Standard, another magazine which frequently claims the mantle of Arab democracy and attacks Obama for failing on it, has thus far published exactly zero articles about Tunisia (though, to his credit, frequent Standard contributor and ex-Bush administration official Elliott Abrams has weighed in on it at his new CFR blog). Why are the most prominent media voices on Arab democracy so entirely absent on the Arab reform story of the year?

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It's very clear that most Arab regimes are on edge over the possibility of the spread of the protests in Tunisia and Algeria. Arab columnists and TV shows have been excitedly debating the real causes of the protests and what they might mean, while in country after country warnings are being sounded of a repeat of the "Tunisia scenario." It's not at all clear whether these protests actually will spread yet, as regimes on high alert will not be taken by surprise and local conditions vary dramatically.

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Yesterday I noted the spread of seemingly unrelated protests and clashes through a diverse array of Arab states -- Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt. Last night, protests spread to Algeria, partly in response to rising prices on basic food items but more deeply by the same combination of economic desperation, fury over perceived corruption, and a blocked political order. There's some evidence that Algerians have been carefully watching what is happening in Tunisia, on al-Jazeera and on the internet. Are we seeing the beginnings of the Obama administration equivalent of the 2005 "Arab Spring", when the protests in Beirut captured popular attention and driven in part by newly powerful satellite television images inspired popular mobilization across the region that some hoped might finally break through the stagnation of Arab autocracy? Will social media play the role of al-Jazeera this time? Will the outcome be any different?

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For the last few weeks, a massive wave of protests has been rocking Tunisia over the Ben Ali regime's alleged corruption, authoritarianism, and economic failings. A grisly suicide attack on a Coptic Christian Church in Alexandria on New Year's Day has sparked escalating worries about the state of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. Over the last few days, Jordanian security forces have struggled to put down riots in the southern town of Maan, the latest in an increasingly worrisome trend towards local violence and clashes. Kuwaiti politics continue to be roiled by the fallout from the Dec. 8 attack by security forces against law professor Obaid al-Wasimi and a group of academics and parliamentarians. What do these have in common?

These four seemingly unrelated incidents over the last month all draw attention to the accelerating decay of the institutional foundations and fraying of the social fabric across many of the so-called "moderate," pro-Western Arab regimes. What seems to link these four ongoing episodes, despite the obvious differences, is a combination of authoritarian retrenchment, unfulfilled economic promises, rising sectarianism at the popular level, and deep frustration among an increasingly tech-savvy rising generation. The internal security forces in these states remain powerful, of course, and it's unlikely that any of the regimes will fall any time soon (though some analysts seem more enthusiastic about the prospects for change in Tunisia). But even if these upgraded authoritarians can keep hold of power, there's a palpable sense that these incidents represent the leading edge of rising economic, social and political challenges which their degraded institutions are manifestly unable to handle.

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Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions Within Al-Qa'ida and its Periphery, a new report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, was released publicly yesterday at an event at the New America Foundation (I couldn't make it, but you can already see video here). By digging deep into al Qaeda's internal ideological and strategic division and its contentious relationship with most other Islamist factions, Self-Inflicted Wounds offers an essential corrective to popular narratives of a single, undifferentiated Islamist menace. It fleshes out a broad trend towards more differentiated analysis of al Qaeda and policies which divide rather than unite the disparate strands of Islamism.

Self-Inflicted Wounds gives a realistic sense of where al Qaeda really fits within the map of Islamism, neither minimizing nor exaggerating its threat. It demonstrates powerfully the value of disaggregating the challenge posed by various Islamist movements rather than lumping them together into a single, undifferentiated menace. It's slightly dated now, since most of the chapters were completed more than a year ago, and it doesn't quite capture the rise of the franchises such as AQAP or the new trend of small-scale attempted attacks. But despite that inevitable limitation, I believe it makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of al Qaeda and its milieu. It demonstrates how essential it is to understand these movements from within and on their own terms, and how counterproductive it is to ignore those distinctions.

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The Atlantic asked me to name an outstanding book from 2010 in Middle East Studies. I chose John Calvert's Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. In honor of that choice, I'm delighted to publish today Calvert's essay "The Afterlife of Sayyid Qutb" on the Middle East Channel, an essay which fills in one of the only real gaps in the book. Choosing only one book was difficult, but fortunately I have a blog of my own to offer a longer list of the best books published this year on the Middle East -- or at least the best books published this year which I actually had time to read, which means that it's far from exhaustive. Without further ado, the list:

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