Over the past three decades the Arab world has witnessed enormous political events. Some events of the distant past are still exercising their hidden influence in the present.
An instance of single events having wide-scale consequences is former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977.
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 followed by the American invasion of Iraq sparked events with far-reaching consequences in the region. Iraq was weakened and thrown out of the regional power equation and relegated to a state that suited Iran’s schemes in the region.
Seven years after this, the waves of people’s revolutions that swept the region were released and now they have reached their peak. In the course of these events, relations between society and state were put under severe strain on one hand and on the other it revealed many unknown aspects of these relations.
People’s revolutions led to bloody encounters between the people and their regimes. The most horrendous of these encounters were observed in Libya and Syria.
The situation also shed light on the positions of both society and regimes in their political systems. There are a lot of things that can be learned from these events.
The former Iraqi regime experienced its downfall at the hands of foreign powers while the Libyan regime was crushed with the support of NATO’s air force.
The Syrian regime has not stopped its daily massacre of protesters. This is because of the principle of avoiding foreign intervention in the internal matters of a country.
The observation of the situation in countries that have been passing through the revolution affirms two points.
The first is that the Libya, Iraq and Syria had the worst governments in modern Arab history. Their regimes are not only autocratic but resorts to wide scale killings, persecution and violation of the honor of individuals as well as groups as a whole.
They are governments that partly apply the old political axiom that a successful ruler is the one who terrifies people and at the same time wins their admiration.
The rulers of the three countries resorted to creating fear deep in the people’s hearts. On the other hand, they did not want the people to aspire for anything, but wanted them to believe that they alone could offer them security.
This was a common feature shared by all three regimes. However, the people in Libya and Iraq had to depend on external interference to get rid of their oppressive regime.
This situation reveals the weakness of society against their regime, which controls all the sources of material power. The relationship between the regime and its people is based on fear, forebodings, falsehood and mistrust.
It is a relationship dictated by the need for security and not by mutual contract, exchange of benefits and resources, law or trust. It was under such a system that the Iraqi people refused to stand by their former president while he was hounded by US forces in 2003, despite the Iraqi revulsion toward American policy and their distrust in US motives.
The Iraqi people were torn between the instinctive dislike for foreign invasion and the rejection of a ruler who showered upon them nothing but humiliation and suppression and whimsical wars. When the US forces entered Baghdad, according to television reports the president ran to the street but only a few people rallied round him.
The situation led him to flee from the capital in search of shelter elsewhere. The incident indicates the distance between Saddam and his countrymen. After the war the Iraqi situation became worse. The men that came to power riding on tanks threw the country into an abyss of sectarianism and civil war from which it did not emerge even nine years after the fall of Baghdad.
In the case of Col. Muammar Qaddafi his end was hard and horrifying although in line with his cruelty and terrible ways. In his address made at the start of the revolution Qaddafi justified the use of force against protesters.
It showed the people that the colonel was preparing for massacres against the demonstrators, especially those at the center of protests in Benghazi. Three forces participated in the battles in Libya — Qaddafi forces, opposition forces and NATO’s air force.
The number of victims was huge, running to 50,000. What is the meaning of this huge number of people being killed to get rid of a ruler who is just a single individual?
It shows the willingness of this ruler to use extreme power to remain in power, whatever calamity it would bring to the country. The lives of the people are nothing to him.
The situation is further worsened as society did not have the strength to rein in the irresponsible ruler. These are the situations that made foreign intervention imperative in Libya and Iraq.
After over more than 16 months the Syrian revolution achieved a balance in killings. The murders are evenly distributed. The opposition could not bring down the regime, nor was the regime capable of stopping the uprising.
The evenness in killings means the regime has lost the battle and is heading for its final fall. It had survived on the silence and submission of the society in the past.
It appears that Syrians are extraordinarily courageous before the regime’s heavy killer machines. They have replaced their material weakness with moral power.
The Arab Spring in the three countries has also revealed the criminal intent inherent in their regimes. What demonstrates the weakness of the societies in these countries is their failure against the political betrayal of their regimes.
The people also failed to stop the regime’s support for the forces of suppression. All these factors confirm one known fact: The Arab political experiments that began at the beginning of the last century have failed totally in the building of a nation.
A century in the life of Arab societies only resulted in regimes controlled by a single man without any institutional support, legal basis or legitimacy drawn from the majority of the people. For them the power itself was the source of their legitimacy.
Whenever society wanted to reform this equation, bloody confrontations took place. It is a natural confrontation.
The political principles are marginalized in a regime with a mafia base. Such a regime will be brutal and relying on violence.
Every regime attempted to clamp down on the Arab revolutions with violence the moment the protest emerged, particularly in Libya and Syria. There was no way to avoid bloody suppression without the regime accepting the equation of power governing relations with people.
On this occasion we should be aware of the difference in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia from the other three countries. The political power of the people in the two countries was not weaker than the other three.
In the case of Egypt the army is still a balancing power. It is a coherent and strong establishment with a popular base and all look for the cooperation of the military to pass the transition period.
The military in Egypt and Tunisia are not colluding with the ruling team unlike in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The military enjoys a reasonable level of freedom and professionalism.
Another feature in the two countries is that civil society is stronger and mature. These factors allowed the public to demonstrate in large numbers and enabled them to mount political pressure on the regime and force it to give them more concessions, even though it did not lead to the downfall of the regime.
In Syria and Libya demonstrations are banned and may lead to the death of those who flout the ban. That is why the transition of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt has been gradual.
It might happen in Libya as well with the first successful parliamentary elections after Qaddafi’s exit. In Syria the road is stained with blood.
It poses the question: Away from the index of apparent material power on the surface, what is the goal of the regime’s power and weakness of the society and what are the bases of the two situations?

- Courtesy of Al-Hayat newspaper
.