As protesters overwhelmed former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's security forces in Tunis, the regional office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the George W. Bush administration's signature democracy promotion organization, watched as its mandate was fulfilled in the most unlikely of places.

It is, to say the least, an awkward bit of symbolism. MEPI defines its mission as "develop[ing] more pluralistic, participatory, and prosperous societies." And in the country where it is based, the Tunisian people proved themselves to be uniquely and spectacularly unhappy with their regime.

But according to current and former democracy promotion advocates in the U.S. government, the decision to base MEPI's offices in Tunisia was made because the embassy had enough free space to accommodate its staff, and the country was thought to be stable enough to not interfere with the organization's sometimes controversial work.

Scott Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration who oversaw the creation of MEPI, said that the Ben Ali regime was "constantly paranoid" about the organization's presence in the country, and never allowed it to undertake significant democracy promotion programs. As a result, "we were doing a lot of stuff very, very quietly - not to say covert, but very quietly," Carpenter said.

The Ben Ali regime's hostility to any efforts to open up the political system was attested to by other Western diplomats who served in Tunis. Alan Goulty, who served as the British ambassador in the country from 2004 to 2008, said that the government would constantly raise the specter of terrorism to discourage any contact with Tunisian opposition figures.

"There was one explosion in 1987 of a bomb, where a British lady was wounded and lost her leg," Goulty said. "I lost count of the times that Tunisian officials, 15 years later, reminded me of that incident to justify their claims that the Tunisian opposition, whatever form it took, was terrorist."

In theory, the European Union should have had considerable economic and political leverage to convince the Ben Ali regime to liberalize. Trade between EU member states and Tunisia in 2009 was in excess of $20 billion - by comparison, total U.S. imports and exports to the country were valued at around $800 million. The EU association agreement with Tunisia also provided a ready-made avenue for discussion human rights and political liberalization. In practice, however, EU efforts in the country were anemic at best.

"Frankly, the EU always pulled its punches [on democracy promotion], because of the need to operate unanimously," said Goulty. "And a different approach was taken by [our] Mediterranean partners, principally France and Italy, who believed that the best way forward was to get close to the regime and further one's economic interests."

In fact, the primary contribution that the United States made to Tunisia's recent unrest was neglect. As U.S. relations with the other North African states improved over the past two decades, the relative importance of Tunisia as a U.S. ally in the region declined. U.S. diplomats may not have had much success promoting liberalization in the country, but the national security implications of the fall of Ben Ali's regime raised steadily fewer concerns in Washington.

David Mack, currently a scholar at the Middle East Institute, served as the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Tunisia from 1979 to 1982. "If you go back to the time when I was there, our relations were disappearing with Libya, we had poor relations with Algeria, and strained relationships in many parts of the Muslim world," he noted. "But the reality is that today Tunisia plays a smaller role overall in U.S. strategic political calculation."

However, diplomats insisted that Tunisia's apparent stability under Ben Ali did not cause them to underestimate the population's grievances with his regime. A prescient June 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks criticizes the "sclerotic" regime, which it says has "lost touch with the Tunisian people." The same memo complains that "make it exceptionally difficult for the US Mission to conduct business" and meet with regime opponents.

Those who spent time in the country seconded that assessment. "The place was so sterile -- you just feel people's fear, and the complete lack of dynamism in the society," said Carpenter. "Within the State Department we used to refer to it as ‘Syria with a smile.'"  

Events are still moving quickly in Tunisia, where word has just come out that 87-year-old Fouad Mebaza, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, is now the new interim president after someone (we don't know who) determined that yesterday's takeover by the prime minister wasn't strictly legal. Also today, Saudi Arabia announced that it had welcomed Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted president, and his family.

Under Article 57 of the Tunisian Constitution -- invoked today by the Constitutional Council because Ben Ali has fled the country and is therefore incapable of performing his duties -- Mebaza can only be in charge for a maximum of 60 days, after which he must hold a new presidential election (in which he is not allowed to run). Whoever wins may at that point dissolve the parliament and hold new legislative elections. 

We'll have some informed anlysis of the particulars in a few hours, but here are a few questions to think about.

Who is actually running the country right now? The military? The security services? Top civilian officials? Where are these decisions coming from?

Is it a good sign that the Tunisian regime, or rather what's left of it, is trying to following constitutional procedure?

Can one of the most repressive governments in the world, where the last presidential contest saw Ben Ali re-elected with 90 percent of the vote, organize and hold a credible election in only 60 days? Does it want to, or will it try to cheat? And are there any opposition figures who have the national stature to win?

How will the protesters, who seem to have largely stayed home again today, react to this new development? Was getting rid of Ben Ali enough to satisfy them? Or will they now fracture, as the regime probably intends?

More later.

What's the protocol for diplomats when the government they serve has collapsed? The staff at the Tunisian Embassy here in downtown Washington DC, apparently deciding that the political paralysis at home required a visual metaphor at their foreign outpost, immobilized the building's front gate with a tightly-coiled iron chain and a padlock. The modernist embassy building served this afternoon as a silent backdrop to a couple of dozen Tunisian immigrants chatting excitedly among themselves as the occasional passing car honked in solidarity and two secret service officers casually stood to one side.

Chained-up as it was, the embassy was hardly making a show of hospitality, but a doorbell offered at least the promise of some normal communication. A man's voice promptly answered over the intercom, "Oui?"

I introduced myself.

"We are closed."

Might there be someone I could speak with?

"There's no one here."

And you are?

"Security."

Anyone else there?

"We are closed."

The demonstrators told me to give it up. "They are in there, but they are afraid," Monaem Mabrouki, a Tunisian immigrant, told me. "We don't want to hurt them, but they don't feel like celebrating with us." I imagine it's only a matter of time: the scene on the street seemed a lot more fun than the aura of angsty silence coming from the embassy. But who can begrudge a day of private mourning for the passing away of a political order?

A man takes a look at a rank of cabinet-sized rooms at China's first capsule hotel to be opened soon in Shanghai on January 11, 2011. China has followed Japan's lead in the capsule hotel market, amid an explosion of leisure travel in the world's most populous country.

In the wee hours of the morning on Friday, Nigeria's ruling People's Democratic Party decided on their candidate for the spring presidential election -- the accidental incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, who took over when his former boss died in office last spring. The markets were pleased, and almost no one was particularly surprised. Jonathan is now a shoo-in favorite to win the presidency for another term. If only it were so simple.

Many a pundit has rehashed the point of contention going into yesterday's primary: The party's gentleman's agreement to rotate the office between north and south every eight years should have shoehorned a northerner into the candidacy this year -- but Jonathan is from the south. So not surprisingly, Jonathan was up against a popular northern politician for the nomination, a former vice president, Atiku Abubakar. That Jonathan won is no small testament to the political lobbying he has done in recent weeks (but also likely to the fact that the man in power controls the party machinery). The numbers look pretty convincing -- 2,736 delegates voted for Jonathan while just 807 voted for Abubakar.

Dig down at the state level, however, and you'll see the rift -- particularly in the country's middle belt, where north and south meet (and where intercommunal violence has erupted in recent months). A good example is Bauchi state, where Jonathan won by a margin of 2 votes -- 46 to 44. In northern Zamfara state, Jonathan won just one-tenth of Abubakar's share.

Abubakar will likely still run -- just under the umbrella of another party organization. The question is, will the north support him? And will they protest should he lose? Religion and location (which largely correspond, thanks to colonial rulers' partitions) have long been used to stoke violence in Nigeria.

Of late, the stakes have risen, however; violent groups in both regions, north and south, have taken to bomb attacks to make their point. On New Year's Eve, a bomb rocked army barracks in Abuja -- an attack that the government initially blamed on northern Islamist extremists. Rebels in the oil-rich Niger Delta region (where Jonathan is from) also exploded a car bomb in Abuja last fall. 

No doubt, it's the beginning of a very interesting election season.

It's hard to envy the position Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in these last few weeks: There just aren't many good answers available to despots who are faced with popular uprisings. Still, he should have known better than to settle on Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's 1978-1979 playbook for quelling incipient revolutions.

Indeed, Ben Ali seemed intent on compressing the shah's yearlong series vacillations into a tidy one-week time frame. First, a show of denial: The shah started 1978 by denouncing street protests as conspiracies directed from abroad, while Ben Ali started this week by declaring mass demonstrations to be "terrorist acts." Next a halfhearted show of force to restore law and order: In the autumn of 1978, the shah declared martial law and organized a military government; Ben Ali, for his part, imposed a nationwide curfew this week and presumably instructed security forces to use deadly force against continued protests. Then a hasty series of concessions that are inevitably interpreted as too little, too late: Late in the game, each leader tried to shuffle his cabinet into a more liberal arrangement. That's followed by a transparently cynical, and frankly depressing, declaration of sympathy for the protests: The shah went on television in November to announce, "I have heard the voice of your revolution"; Ben Ali went on television on Thursday to tell his restive populace, "I have understood you." Finally, there's the retreat into exile -- the shah fled to Egypt in January 1979, while Ben Ali is now reported to be in Malta, France, or Saudi Arabia. (The aftermath is unlikely to get any rosier for Ben Ali, judging from the shah's experience: He shuttled around the world -- from Morocco, to Mexico, to the Bahamas, to the United States to Switzerland -- in search of an offer of residence that was more than temporary, until he finally died in 1980.)

The shah's unsteady strategy was already discredited in the eyes of the current regime in Iran, which came into power after his departure -- hence, the Iranian leadership's unremitting hard-line crackdown when it was faced with mass protests in the wake of the country's 2009 presidential election. Tunisia's current revolution may well be seen in Tehran, and perhaps in other regional capitals, less as a reminder of the power of popular action than as confirmation of Ben Ali's personal weakness in refusing to pick a position and stick with it. If any other governments threaten to collapse in the wake of Tunisia's successful revolution, you can expect that the protests will be met with either an outstretched hand or a clenched fist, but certainly not both.

In a dramatic turn of events, Mohamed Ghannouchi, Tunisia's prime minister, has just announced that he is temporarily taking control of the country. Details are still murky, and nobody seems to know where President Ben Ali is. Rumor has it that he's fled to France, or Malta under Libyan protection, or that the Army prevented him from escaping.

Ghannouchi put the matter this way: "Since the president is temporarily unable to exercise his duties, it has been decided that the prime minister will exercise temporarily the duties."

Earlier today, after thousands of protesters surrounded the Interior Ministry and battled security forces in the streets, Ben Ali announced that he had dissolved the government and would hold elections in six months. Then there were rumblings that there would be an announcement on state television, and many assumed that Ben Ali was going to make another speech.

Instead, Ghannouchi, a colorless functionary in his late 60s, showed up, surrounded by two other senior officials, and made his surprising announcement.

This may not solve the crisis. Ghannouchi is not necessarily any more popular than Ben Ali, though he's not nearly as tainted by the lurid tales of corruption and excess that so damaged the ruling family. But Tunisians certainly don't respect the prime minister; they call him "Mr. Oui Oui" because he's always saying yes to Ben Ali.

This is obviously a fast-moving story, and nobody seems to know what's going on with the Tunisian military. The police are much more powerful and numerous, and as of this afternoon there were still reports of gunfire against protesters. But there were also signs that security forces were unwilling to crack down and that may have told Ben Ali that it was time to get out of Dodge.

UPDATE: Here's the BBC's translation of Ghannouchi's full statement:

"Citizens, men and women! In accordance with the provisions of chapter 56 of the constitution, which stipulates that in case of the impossibility of the president to conduct his duties temporarily, he would delegate his prerogatives to the prime minister. Given the difficulty for the president of the republic to carry out his duties temporarily, I will, starting from now, exercise the prerogatives of the president of the republic. I urge all sons and daughters of Tunisia - of all ideological and political persuasions and of all sections and regions - to show the spirit of patriotism and unity in order to enable our country, which is dear to all of us, to overcome this difficult juncture and to ensure its security and stability. While I assume this responsibility, I promise to respect the constitution and to carry out political, economic and social reforms which have been announced. I will do so with perfection and through consultation with all national bodies - including political parties, national organisations and civil society components. May God grant me success!"

As I spoke by phone with Taoufik Ben Brik, a Tunisian opposition journalist, just moments ago, the country's president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, got onto a plane and left the country. "There will be a military coup -- we will see. You will see," Ben Brik told me. "The army has just closed down the airspace in Tunisia, and they are arresting members of the family."

If Twitter is to be believed, Ben Ali really is gone. 

Ben Brik, one of the (now former?) president's most pronounced critics, described the regime as "the worst kind of tyranny -- [running] a police state, a military state, and a surveillance state." Ben Brik himself has been subject to that as a journalist, having been harassed and imprisoned on numerous occasions. "It wasn't just that I was arrested -- I was harassed, me and my family. Google me and you will see how they arrested my child, just 14 years old." Ben Brik was most recently released last April and remains in Tunis, where he is watching the situation unfold on the streets.

What brought the protesters to the streets in the first place was the drive for democracy, a place where freedom was possible -- and normal. And yes, WikiLeaks helped. "WikiLeaks revealed a truth previously unspeakable about the mafia-like state," Ben Brik said.

With the president gone, maybe this really is the first WikiLeaks revolution.