The Bahraini incidents exposed some of the divisions endured by the Arab communities. It was necessary to see the movements demanding change backfiring through confessional and sectarian bloody conflicts exploited by the regional powers, to become convinced of the vastness of the vacuum on which the official Arab regime was built. Muammar al-Gaddafi unleashed the hands of the Arab rulers through his response to the peaceful demonstrations with insanity. Meanwhile, the Bahraini oppositionists and especially the more radical wings among them, offered a lesson in the lack of any competence at the level of the management of the action, and the disproportion between their actual power and what could be perceived as being a threat affecting the situation in the entire Gulf. This talk does not aim at downplaying the rightfulness of the demands of the Bahraini protesters. However, the unfortunate geopolitical situation rendered their country yet another arena for Arab-Iranian and Sunni-Shiite confrontation, while there are many Arab countries prone to play that same role. In this context, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria constitute samples for the predicaments of democratic change and the ending of the vertical division. The slogans issued during the gathering staged by Hezbollah in downtown Beirut yesterday to express solidarity with the demonstrators in Manama, the reiteration of “Iran… Iran” and the blunt sectarian insults toward the Bahraini authorities' violence in the attack on the Pearl Square camp, were samples of the civil hatred which rises above democratic and social changes in Lebanon and Bahrain among others. Moreover, the Syrian authorities' excessive brutality when dispersing those who had gathered in front of the Interior Ministry – reaching the point of arresting figures such as intellectual Tayyib Tizini and Mrs. Suhair al-Atassi among dozens of people who were demanding the release of the political detainees – shows the extent to which the Syrian security bodies are willing to go to uphold the privileges of their chiefs. The same had been done by the disbanded Egyptian state security apparatus toward the January 25 revolution. No one is naïve enough to believe it would be easy to induce change in the Arab world. In the meantime, the underdevelopment of the Arab regimes and the absence of any strategic vision for reform, the transition of power and the expansion of the spectrum of public freedoms in it, rendered armed violence the most likely tool to respond to the domestic threat. In addition, the fact that our governments have been closed up on themselves for decades, that we have no think tanks and that their vision of the world is backward, encourages them to collect all the accusations that are fabricated by their leaders to cast them in the face of their oppositionists. Consequently, it was not odd to see the emergence of a sudden alliance between the dealers of hallucination pills, Al-Qaeda organization, Iran, Israel, the United States, Britain and Hamas to topple Hosni Mubarak, Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh. And while the fears over the wide popular movement led to the promotion of this alliance in the media outlets of the collapsing regimes, this does not deny the presence of attempts to exploit the changes in the Arab world. That is an undeniable truth. At this level, one must address what we believe is the most important question during this stage: Before this decay, the difficulty of inducing change and the underlying tendencies to engage in civilian and sectarian infighting in the Arab world, did the Arab people commit a mistake when they opened Pandora's Box by toppling Ben Ali and Mubarak? We do not believe this is the case. History testifies for the fact that the disregarding of negative interactions in our surrounding, does not mean they do not exist and that their threat will not escalate. What is happening today in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen and what will happen tomorrow in more than one Arab country, cannot be kept in a locked box, even if all the elements of the Arab security bodies were to sit on it. The Arabs are over-indebted from their future and the time has come to for them to settle the dues of the present.
