Tunisia: test of Western protestations of democracy

Will Tunisia now herald the breakthrough to democracy for the Arab world?   Just as a small revolt in rural Hungary in 1989 sparked an interconnected  movement for freedom across the whole East European region, so an equally small but evocative incident in rural Tunisia has triggered a mass revolt   which may prove unstoppable across the bloc of authoritarian Arab states.   The issue however is: given Western interests throughout the oil-rich Middle East and visceral hostility to the spread of Islamic states, will the West allow this break-out to seek its own spirations to freedom or intervene as it did with such horrendous consequences in Algeria in the 1990s?