> No need to get into a pissing match.
Agreed, so don't start them :)
> Do you really think people can just walk up to Gadhafi and say, "we protest peacefully, so please give us power"?
No, but I do think that if they cripple the country for an extended period that he'll find himself without a police force and an army to do his bidding. (see for instance Poland)
> Do you think Saddam could have been deposed peacefully by his people?
Saddam Himself would not have survived any turn but he did not have much foreign support, Mubarak on the other hand still has a lot of foreign support.
> Since we geeks love to categorize and form patterns, I'll put this forward: the difference between the erstwhile empires (like the British, French, etc.) and these despots is that those empires weren't cults of personality; there wasn't 1 person brutalizing the public, like you have here (Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gadhafi (who's shitting bricks right now)). So when the push comes to shove, the employees of the "empire" can walk away and allow for peaceful transition of power; but the servants of these despots are too closely tied to their masters (sometimes it is tribal loyalty), and don't go away quietly.
I'm with you there, and I think that some blood will flow. But it had better be the right blood, to incite unarmed protesters to take on heavily armed riot police and military is a great way to get a lot of people killed and to go back to the status quo afterwards. Plenty of times this recipe has been tried and has failed plenty of times as well (it did occasionally succeed, but those were unfortunately the exceptions rather than the rule).
> And finally: even though one may say that Gandhi's "revolution" was peaceful, don't forget the million people killed in the subsequent blood-letting known as the "Partition", where India and Pakistan were split from one.
Yes, that was very ugly, and effectively it has not even stopped today, and I don't think it will stop in the foreseeable future.