The success of Liberty
Michael Costello has written a captivating piece in The Australian about the positives of the votes in the Middle East:
And of course the fate of democracy is by no means assured. There are plenty of examples of the "one man, one vote, one time" situation where democracy is followed by dictatorship. There have been plenty of military coups and outside interventions crushing democracy, not just in eastern Europe but in Latin America (Chile and Guatemala) and the Middle East (Iran in 1953). Russia today and many of the former southern Soviet republics are a pale shadow of the democratic ideal with which they were seized in the 1990s. These failures are said to show that these countries were "not ready".
The remarkable thing is that many countries have bounced back from democratic regression to renewed democracy: Thailand, South Korea, Chile are just a few examples. The whole of eastern Europe is another. It's incredibly difficult to keep down the instinct for liberty.

No one is arguing it's not a slow and painful process. But there are reasons to believe it's the right one.