As I was watching the news coverage over the past few days, watching endless reruns of Saddam's statue toppling (and listening to the increasingly vapid pronouncements of the newscasters...), I wondered how this was playing out across the Islamic world...

Not how the media interpreted it, but how the average person saw it.

I wondered if the US realized the significance of their actions when they toppled that statue - they have shattered the glass house that much of the autocratic Arab world inhabits, smashed the metaphorical chalice. They have committed a revolutionary act - the US has demonstratably shown to the millions of poor, unrepresented, down-trodden masses of the Islamic world - that the control of their rulers is fallible - it is mortal - and it can end.

I wonder what revolutionaries they have now inspired? The lessons will certainly not be ignored. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria...the list of autocracies is long and, as much of the opposition to these regimes is itself base, backward and repressive, I wonder what will be birthed from these events.

Unless the West pushes hard in supporting the birth of democracy in Iraq and then in actively extending the franchise across the Middle East, I fear that the primarly result will be a rise in revolutionary theocracies that will prove even more unsettling and unstable politically then the repressive strongmen that now hold sway.

I hope I'm wrong...but I suspect I'm not.