That’s what people are asking all over the world. The Washington Post featured an opinion column titled What’s Left? Shame. Some excerpts:

Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains — and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy — have been proved wrong.

More:

When a Le Monde editorial titled “Arab Spring” acknowledges “the merit of George W. Bush,” when the cover headline of London’s The Independent is “Was Bush Right After All?” and when a column in Der Spiegel asks “Could George W. Bush Be Right?” you know that something radical has happened.

and finally:

Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading “Thank you, George W. Bush,” and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.