Quick Hit: Maybe I Was Too Cynical

Back in January, in response to some of the initial unrest in Tunisia, I wrote that formal prosecutions of Middle Eastern autocrats struck me as unlikely. Reasoning from recent international and domestic precedents, the necessarily incomplete nature of most revolutions, the complicity of key state institutions in pre-revolutionary regimes, and the self-preservation instinct among nations' elites, I guessed that we wouldn't see much in the way of formal legal proceedings. Show trials/assassinations maybe, but not legal action. Well, the Egyptians have exposed me as too cynical. Not only is Mubarak being prosecuted, but he's being prosecuted by the very people he put into office. Rule of law and all that. Nice when the world offers up a pleasant surprise for a change.