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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The great debates about Iraq policy which consumed much of the past decade have largely faded from the public arena. The Obama administration has withdrawn more than 100,000 troops from Iraq, while the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008 commits the U.S. to withdrawing the balance of its troops by the end of next year. Iraqi politics muddle along, while the security situation remains roughly stable with periodic spikes of spectacular violence but no signs of a resurgent civil war. But while the U.S. political debate about Iraq has faded, the importance of Iraq to American interests has not. It's therefore rather extraordinary that Congress has moved to cut $500 million from funding for the U.S. civilian mission in Iraq, leaving a shortfall of more than $1 billion.

Yesterday a wide array of Iraq policy analysts of wildly different perspectives converged on an appeal for the United States to remain committed to Iraq politically in order to deliver on a long-term strategic relationship beyond the military mission. I authored an op-ed with John Nagl, my colleague at the Center for a New American Security, arguing for a continued political engagement. Meanwhile, Brookings released a report entitled Unfinished Business, co-authored by Ken Pollack, Raad AlKadiri, Scott Carpenter, Fred Kagan and Sean Kane. There's a striking degree of analytical and policy convergence among people who used to be at sharp odds over Iraq. Nagl and I are colleagues at the Center for a New American Security but we sharply disagreed back in 2007-08 about the appropriate strategy for Iraq, as did many of the people involved in yesterday's Brookings Report. Nagl and I had not read the Brookings report at the time when we wrote the Christian Science Monitor op-ed. That we all converge on a roughly similar position today is significant - a "harmonic convergence" which the authors of the Brookings report nicely recount: "members of our group who had once been ready to do great violence to one another over their differences found themselves in violent agreement over what needed to be done." The conclusion of my piece with Nagl nicely captures this, I hope:

Today, those who backed the 2007 "surge" should be keen to see its gains consolidated, while those who called for withdrawal should be keen to make sure that as it happens, disaster does not follow. And while Iraq certainly needs to step up its political game, the United States must also muster the bipartisan political strength and will to help build a stable Iraq that can be a partner to the United States in a vital -- and deeply troubled -- part of the world. Those who gave their lives for this fight deserve nothing less.

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"The Saudis always want to fight Iranians to the last American" and it is "time for them to get in the game," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the French foreign minister in a newly released cable from February 2010. This captures perfectly the point I made yesterday about how to read the reporting in these cables about the private hawkishness of Arab leaders. The question of Arabs and Iran was never an information problem -- it's an analysis problem. The antipathy which many of these leaders feel for Iran has long been well known. But so has their reluctance to do anything about it. And so have the internal divisions within Arab governments and Gulf ruling families, and their deep fears of either Iranian retaliation or popular upheaval, and their bottomless hunger for U.S. weapons systems, and their hopes that the U.S. would magically solve their problems for them, and the disconnect between the palaces and the public.

Iran hawks have been gloating that the quotes from a few Arab leaders in the initial cable release vindicate their analysis and discredit skeptics of military action against Iran. It doesn't. Gates' comment about the Saudis needing to "get into the game" came almost two years after King Abdullah's now-famous "cut off the head of the snake" comment. And another cable from January 2008 shows Abdullah telling Sarkozy that Saudi Arabia "does not want to inflame the situation," recommends "continued international engagement" with Iran and "is not yet ready to take any action besides diplomacy." Maybe, just maybe, those private remarks weren't actually a very reliable guide to what the Saudis will really do in public?

The way the Iran hawks have been leaping at a few juicy quotes while ignoring the entire well-known context only shows the ongoing poverty of their analysis. I would expect better from the serious analysts on the hawkish side, but, well, there you are.

 (Note: updated to include the Sarkozy-Abdullah cable)