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explicitly married Shiite religious zeal with historic Persian ambitions
and also played on sharply anti-Western sentiments in the region.
Iran's clerical regime worked to spread the revolution across the
Middle East; Saudi Arabia and its allies worried that it would
succeed. For a time it looked like it might. There were large
demonstrations and purported antigovernment plots in Saudi Arabia's
Eastern Province, which has a large population of Shiite Muslim
Arabs, and in Bahrain, where Shiites are a distinct majority and Iran
had claimed sovereignty as recently as 1970.
The protests that began this past January in Tunisia had nothing to do
with any of this. They started when a struggling street vendor in that
country's desolate heartland publicly set himself on fire after a local
officer cited his cart for a municipal violation. His frustration,
multiplied hundreds of thousands times, boiled over in a month of
demonstrations against Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
To the amazement of the Arab world, Mr. Ben Ali fled the country
when the military declined to back him by brutally putting down the
demonstrations.
Spurred on by televised images and YouTube videos from Tunisia,
protests broke out across much of the rest of the Arab world. Within
weeks, millions were on the streets in Egypt and Hosni Mubarak was
gone, shown the door in part by his longtime backer, the U.S.
government. The Obama administration was captivated by this
spontaneous outbreak of democratic demands and at first welcomed it
with few reservations. In Riyadh, Saudi officials watched with alarm.
They became furious when the Obama administration betrayed, to
Saudi thinking, a longtime ally in Mr. Mubarak and urged him to step
down in the face of the street demonstrations.
The Egyptian leader represented a key bulwark in what Riyadh
perceives as a great Sunni wall standing against an expansionist Iran.
One part of that barrier had already crumbled in 2003 when the U.S.

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