Mubarak: An Inspiration For Protests, A Warning For Despots

What happened in Egypt is filling us with motivation to do more.
Protest leader

Michael Totten has written that one of the reasons Iran has resorted to shooting and executing protesters is that Iran's leaders, if ousted, have no country that would take them in.

Likewise, Barry Rubin has noted that the Syrian regime, consisting of Allawis, might not even make it out of the country alive if it was deposed.


Michael Young writes in Now Lebanon how isolated Hezbollah is.


This explains why they will go to any extreme to maintain their relative positions of power.


Now they, and the other Muslim regimes in the region, have an additional reason to hold onto power: No Arab ruler wants to end up like Mubarak:

Facing tenacious uprisings, the leaders of Syria, Libya and Yemen must have thought of their own possible fates when they saw their one-time peer Hosni Mubarak in a defendants cage, on trial for charges that could carry a death sentence.

For the three authoritarian Arab leaders, the choices are limited: Cling to power at any cost, negotiate immunity or find a foreign haven.

That fear of facing Mubarak's fate instead of being able to negotiate a painless removal from power is one of the reasons Gaddafi has been hanging on so tenaciously--and seeing Mubarak on trial is not going to encourage him to give up.

The despots of the region think Mubarak gave up too easily.

Of course, the Arab people themselves see the trial differently:

"Throughout the Arab world, we will see citizens relieved to see a fair trial of a former president who was a tyrant and an oppressor," wrote Egyptian analyst and political activist Amr Hamzawi in Cairo's Al-Shorouk daily. "Others will find inspiration in the Egyptian revolution to continue their own in the hope of freedom, democracy and social justice."

Mubarak, accused of corruption and of ordering the killings of protesters, is the first leader to be tried by his own people in the modern Arab world. That feat eclipses the trial of Iraq's Saddam Hussein because the process that led to Saddam's conviction and execution was supervised by the United States.

Of course, as recent events in Egypt have proven, the fact than a despot is toppled is no guarantee that democracy will fill the vacuum--Islamists see this as an opportunity to assume power.

But that is not going to stop the protesters, and seeing the fate of Mubarak will only make them more determined.

Technorati Tag: Egypt and Mubarak and Arab Spring.