Did Wikileaks bring down Tunisia's President Ben Ali?

That's how the breathless reporting online would have it - the combined might of the internet was what forced Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee Tunis after 24 years in power.

Widespread exuberance on the streets of Tunis was matched by concern in governments across north Africa and the middle east - as the New York Times reported,

The protests' success gripped a region whose residents have increasingly complained of governments that seem incapable of meeting their demands and are bereft of any ideology except perpetuating power. The combustible mix that inspired them - economic woes and revulsion at corruption and repression - seemed to echo in so many other countries in the Middle East, American allies like Egypt foremost among them.

But was there another story too? A Business Insider story has it that the upset was sparked by one of the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks at the end of 2010.

It's not at all clear that Wikileaks actually caused the riots - supposedly most of Tunisia's chattering classes were perfectly aware of how corrupt the Ben Ali family was. According to one Metafilter commenter the reasons had more to do with the wave of food riots that's been sweeping across the region.

However, further down the thread is a link to Andrew Sullivan's blog at the Atlantic which itself links to Elizabeth Dickinson's Foreign Policy post, where she points out:

Of course, Tunisians didn't need anyone to tell them this. But the details noted in the cables -- for example, the fact that the first lady may have made massive profits off a private school -- stirred things up. Matters got worse, not better (as surely the government hoped), when WikiLeaks was blocked by the authorities and started seeking out dissidents and activists on social networking sites.

This chimes with Slavoj Žižek's observation in a recent London Review of Books piece (rather well titled Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks):

The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn't we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

Ars Technica also has some interesting analysis, even if it's a bit more techno-utopianist than is strictly necessary.