Progress is progress, even if it doesn't all come at once, so I'm not complaining. The truth is that, looking at history and the development of the world over the last few centuries, the number of oppressive and autocratic nations is decreasing. The vast majority of North and South America's nations ended up eventually becoming democracies, albeit ones with varying levels of corruption. Western Europe has had it's democratic revolutions finished for a long time now. Eastern Europe followed with the dissolution of the USSR not but 20 years ago. Out of all three continents, what is there left for autocracy? Cuba and Belarus? Venezuela, if you stretch the definition a bit? That's it. And now we have the Arab Spring revolutions and reforms happening. Democracies rarely (if ever) transition into Autocracies, but the reverse isn't true.
Anyway, we don't know for sure that Syria will be the end of this. The protests in Iran might be rekindled by Libya and Syria falling.
Au contraire. Failed democracies can and do transition (rather abruptly sometimes) to autocracy.
Weimar Germany -> Nazi Germany being the most prominent example, but also:
Chile (Allende -> Pinochet)
Pakistan (multiple times)
Turkey (multiple times)
China (from ROC to KMT/CCP, although it can be argued that even Sun Yat-sen's Republic of China wasn't all that much of a democracy. If you do think it was democratic, then it happened twice in quick succession: Sun Yat-sen->Yuan Shikai, then the second time when the Chinese Civil War ended with the KMT exile to Taiwan)
Iran (Mossadegh -> Shah Reza Pahlavi)
Argentina (multiple times)
Guatemala (1954)
Greece (1936, 1967)
Cuba (multiple times)
Paraguay (1954)
Venezuela (1948)
Syria (1949)
Brazil (1937)
Spain (1936)
South Vietnam (multiple times)
Burma (1962)
Dominican Republic (1962)
South Korea (1961)
I could go on, but really....there have been
plenty of democracies that failed and returned to an autocratic state thanks to coups. In some cases, the coups were welcomed by the general population (I'm thinking especially of the ones in Turkey and Pakistan).
I wish I could be more optimistic, but even in the current situation -- look at Egypt. It's a dictatorial regime replaced by...a military junta. Not a whole lot of progress made there in terms of democracy.