Canaries or Red Herrings?

Though reviewer Worth is more pessimistic, I'll plump for it as reality for now:

•  Was the flowering of liberal Arab youth an illusion? Juan Cole, a prominent liberal blogger and scholar of the Middle East, thinks not. In The New Arabs, he argues that the upheavals of 2011 were the product of a new generation of activists that has already wrought deep social changes, and is likely—eventually—to reshape much of the Middle East in its own image: more democratic, more tolerant, and more secular.

Robert F. Worth, “The Pillars of Arab Despotism (review Essay),” The New York Review of Books, October 9, 2014.