World View: The anti-regime demonstrations that worked so rapidly and unexpectedly in Tunisia and Egypt are faltering elsewhere as rulers fight to hold on to power
By Patrick Cockburn
"The Arab awakening is turning into the Arab nightmare. Instead of ushering in democracy, the uprisings in at least three Arab states are fast becoming vicious civil wars. In the past 10 days, crucial developments in Syria, Libya and Yemen have set these countries spiralling into violent and intractable struggles for power....
....An extraordinary aspect of the Syrian uprisings is that people go on demonstrating in their tens of thousands despite so many being shot down. But some are evidently coming to believe that their only alternative is to fight back.
A week ago in Yemen, the demonstrators, who have been marching and rallying in the streets of Sanaa since the start of the year, celebrated jubilantly on hearing the news that President Ali Abdullah Saleh had left the country for hospital in Saudi Arabia after being injured in a bomb attack. "The people, at last, have defeated the regime," the protesters chanted. But it is ludicrous to portray this as a triumph for peaceful protest, since the reason Saleh went to Riyadh was injuries inflicted by a bomb planted in the presidential compound. It is becoming depressingly clear that the Saleh regime is not as dependent on the presence of the president himself as many imagined. Other members of the Saleh clan are in command of well-armed and well-trained military units that remain in control of most of Yemen....
...The deployment of the rebels is now largely decided by Nato, without whose air power the local anti-Gaddafi forces would long ago have been defeated. Most Libyans probably want Gaddafi to go, but the Transitional National Council in Benghazi may not have the legitimacy or the support to replace him. He is very likely to be displaced before the end of the year, but this will be a victory primarily won by Nato and not popular revolution.
...Quite why the family should have decided to declare war on most of the Arab population of Bahrain remains something of a mystery since this will make it permanently reliant on Saudi Arabia. Probably a sense of panic, at its height in March and induced by the fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, explains the intensity of the repression in Bahrain. A price for this will be permanently to deepen the bitter hostility between Shia and Sunni......
The lesson of the past six months in the Arab world is that unless the street protesters can split or guarantee the neutrality of the armed forces, their chance of success is limited. Their only option is to get full-scale foreign military intervention, as has happened in Libya. In practice, this means obtaining support from the US, even if the military action is carried out by the UK and France....
At the same time, not all the instruments of power have changed. Security forces remained. The spontaneous nature of the Arab uprising was at first an advantage because the police did not know who to arrest, but this lack of leadership became a disadvantage when the revolution faced opposition. The moderation of the early protesters is turning out to be a crippling weakness as rulers fight for power."
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