The Arab spring: the Middle East's breathtaking liberalization really isn't about us.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

IN OCTOBER 2010, best-selling New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell published a piece rifled "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted" a derisive attack on the notion that social networking websites would ever play a major role in fomenting meaningful nonviolent resistance to authoritarian regimes. "If you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy," Gladwell argued. "Think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure."

Less than six months later, a series of mostly nonviolent and nonhierarchical protests drove longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak out of office, part of a transnational wave of pro-liberalization protest that is remaking North Africa and the Middle East. One of the most influential Egyptian activists was a young Google executive named Wael Ghonim. The tide arguably turned against Mubarak when he tried to shut down the Internet. "Our revolution," Ghonim told 60 Minutes, "is like Wikipedia, OK?"

Gladwell was not the only deep thinker rendered ridiculous by the remarkable events of early 2011. In mid-January, controversial commentator Stephen M. Walt wrote a confident prediction in a Foreign Policy article rifled "Why the Tunisian Revolution Won't Spread." And in March, as the increasingly deranged Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi sent his warplanes to strafe unarmed protesters even while denying that there were any anti-regime demonstrations (let alone whole swaths of the country under rebel control), Mother Jones and other outlets began excavating a trove of embarrassing op-ed pieces published in 2007 by intellectuals who swore that Qaddafi had turned over a new leaf. (Many of the Qaddafi enthusiasts failed to disclose that they were on the payroll of the P.R. firm Monitor Group, which had taken a $3 million annual contract to burnish Libya's image.)

"Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, [Qaddafi] was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies," wrote Jihad vs. McWorld author (and Monitor recipient) Benjamin Barber in a typical specimen of the genre, published in The Washington Post in August 2007. "Libya under [Qaddafi] has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to...