Authoritarian regimes all over the Third World, including the Arab World, have had their acolytes within Washington-based policy-making circles and among so-called detached 'experts'. Here's an example of the most harrowing kind. Human rights abuses were considered a mere 'dark spot', the absence of democracy not particularly troubling in the broader scheme of things, and neither was the existence of a greedy state elite in Tunisia. As long as they were anti-Islamist then these elites were fine, from such a point of view. And now we see that masses of ordinary people have risen up against these supposedly benign, enlightened regimes that were the favourite of the author and her ilk. The author should feel a sense of great shame, if not the need to explain how absolutely wrong the work was.