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They praised the Tunisian uprising that forced President Zine Al Abidine ben Ali to flee the country last week.

when it comes to the invocation of adjective "moderate" with respect to Tunisia or Egypt what we are really talking about is `moderation' to the extent that "the regime supporting working within the framework of US geo-strategic interests in the region is considered to be moderate-Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, King Abdullah's Jordan

moderate in the sense that they are working very closely with US foreign policy, but they're certainly not moderate with respect to any objective definition of what constitutes democracy and with any definition of what constitutes, you know, universal standards of human right

what needs to be celebrated is that it is for the first time in the modern history of Arab and Islamic world the people of the region are having revolutions

In Egypt, where the leadership continues to rely on a decades-old emergency law that allows arrest without charge, there is a lot of room for free and critical speech, offering a safety valve for expression that did not exist in Tunisia, he said.

Tunisia basically has a choice ahead: whether to continue as the IMF’s, the World Bank’s and Europe’s alleged best pupil in the Arab classroom, with the mixed resultsthat are plain for everyone to see, or to decide for itself, according to its own interests and sovereign decisions, what path and what policies to adopt, whether it be in the foreign policy, domestic policy or economic policy fields. Tunisia can chose to be like Turkey, Brazil, India or Malaysia, or it can pursue in its post-colonial striving for acceptance and the occasional pat on the head by its Western partners, a path followed by Jordan or Morocco with limited success.

For all practical purposes, this is the kind of government that Benali could have appointed himself had he had more brains – his last speech actually outlined exactly this sort of government, and he actually met with some opposition members before being deposed.

The Tunisian people have ousted the dictator, but they haven’t yet got rid of his institutional and political legacy. This is just the beginning, if democracy is to take hold.