A sad lesson of the West’s duplicity with regard to democratic reform in the Arab world, which both Syria and Iran have been happy to embrace, is that pro-Western moderate leaders who gave ground to pro-democracy protesters ended up being swept away, while those who brutally crushed their opponents are hanging on. The West, after all, never put irresistible pressure on any Arab regime to undertake reforms, and deserted its autocratic clients in Tunisia and Egypt only when they failed to nip the revolutionary bud.