US and Middle East revolts

Stephen Zunes writes that:

Regarding Tunisia, the U.S. government was silent during the first weeks of protests despite savage repression by the government. Less than a week after the uprising began, Congress voted for an addition $12 million in security assistance to Ben Ali’s regime. Tear gas canisters lobbed at pro-democracy demonstrators were inscribed with the words “Made in USA,” a reminder of whose side Washington was on in the struggle against the dictatorship. By early January, the State Department began issuing mild criticism of the Ben Ali regime for firing live ammunition into crowds of demonstrators but was equally willing to blame the pro-democracy activists. While the movement was largely nonviolent, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley chose to characterize it by its most unruly components. He stated that the Obama administration was "concerned about government actions, but we're also concerned about actions by the demonstrators, those who do not have peaceful intentions."

He also has links to a Freedom House study that says that after examining the 67 transitions from authoritarian regimes to varying degrees of democratic governments over the past few decades, concluded that they came overwhelmingly through democratic civil society organizations using nonviolent action and other forms of civil resistance. Such transitions did not result from foreign invasion and came about only rarely through armed revolt or voluntary, elite-driven reforms.

And in another study on civil resistance of more than 300 struggles for self-determination against colonialism, military occupation, and colonial rule over the past century, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenowith noted that nonviolent struggles were more than twice as likely to succeed as armed struggles.

In short nonviolent uprisings work:
Throughout the world, in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries, in recent years there has been a dramatic growth of the use of strategic nonviolent action. In contrast to armed struggles, these nonviolent insurrections are movements of organized popular resistance to government authority. Either consciously or by necessity, they eschew the use of weapons of modern warfare. Unlike conventional political movements, nonviolent campaigns usually employ tactics outside the mainstream political processes of electioneering and lobbying. These tactics may include strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, the popular contestation of public space, tax refusal, destruction of symbols of government authority (such as official identification cards), refusal to obey official orders (such as curfew restrictions), and the creation of alternative institutions for political legitimacy and social organization.