The formation of a new Arab order, on the ruins of the order that is in the process of falling, may take a long time. The protests that started from Tunisia to Egypt and spread to Libya will leave their mark on the formation of such an order. It is true that those who rose up in Tunisia and in Egypt did not demand that Arab policy be reconsidered, and did not speculate about it. Yet it is also true that their demands were restricted to reform in their own countries, reform which will only be achieved through a comprehensive direction taken by the Arabs, reaching the economy and politics. The revolution moving from one country to the next in effect refutes all calls to isolationism and topples the slogans promoted by the collapsing regimes, such as “Egypt First”, “Lebanon First” and “Jordan First”, highlighting their affiliation with Washington and their inability to design a single strategy to preserve national security. And just as these regimes represented an obstacle to setting down such a strategy, they represented an obstacle to the development of their peoples and to the democratic directions they were taking, this in addition to their excessive despotism and corruption, as they considered themselves in safety from being held to account as long as they carried out what the “international community” asked of them. The collapsed regimes, and those in the process of falling, considered the popular uprisings to be mere protests over the ill-distribution of wealth and it being held by a handful of loyalists numbering no more than five percent of the population in the best of cases. They thus tried to improve the situation by creating job opportunities and increasing wages, with some of them resorting to ministerial changes and to replacing officials accused of corruption with others. Yet they paid no heed to a very important issue: the fact that they had been squandering their peoples' national dignity for decades. This explains the fact that the Egyptian revolution reclaimed Abdel Nasser's slogan “Raise your Head High” and the feeling of Egyptians that they had regained such dignity. The behavior of those regimes has made a large part of their peoples look to Iran and Turkey, which have both realized that their interest and gaining influence that would help them affect their surroundings and play a role in international politics could not lie in opposing the directions taken by those peoples, while Arab regimes have dealt with their citizens as ignorant cattle that can be directed as one pleases, making an entrenched regime like that of Egypt stand in the face of more than half its people. It is paradoxical that those regimes accused those demanding their rights of being fueled by foreign “agendas”. The Egyptian regime tried to forcibly insert Iran's name, accusing those taking part in the uprising of taking orders from it, while developments have shown that they had nothing to do with any foreign party, and that the opposite was true – i.e. that the regime was relying on foreign support to remain in power, and when foreign powers (the United States) abandoned it, it was laid bare. Ali Abdullah Saleh today is accusing the protesters of moving by orders issued to them from a “center” in Tel Aviv run by Americans and Israelis, not to mention the Al-Qaeda organization. But no one believed him or took his accusations seriously, and there he is waging a war against his own citizens. Neither Mubarak nor Ben Ali before him was able to stand in the face of the movement of history, and Gaddafi's fate will not be different from theirs. This is why we can predict the establishment of a new Arab order. Some of its features, so far, are a greater role for the peoples in setting down domestic and foreign policies, and more independence in making fateful decisions.
