Part I
Libya became the scene of the fiercest conflict as the story of the Arab Spring was unfolding. The NATO campaign of air raids which went on for seven months (March-October, 2011) and was meant to give crucial support to the anti-Gadhafi rebels was in fact the key cause of the collapse of the former Libyan leader's regime. Still, Gadhafi's loyalists will likely continue to put up some amount of resistance in the foreseeable future. There is information that special forces from NATO and several Arab countries – estimatedly, some 1,500 soldiers - were involved in the terminal phase of the overland fight over Libya, particularly in the storming of Tripoli. Rebels took Sirte, the home town of Gadhafi and the last stronghold of his loyalists, in October, 2011 after two months of siege, permanent shelling, and NATO bombings. Based on the data supplied by the rebels, NATO aircrafts hit Gadhafi's convoy when he made an attempt to escape from Sirte. As a result, Gadhafi was injured and shortly killed by the rebels. Gadhafi's son and defense minister also died in the incident. Gadhafi's elder son Saif al-Islam and intelligence chief Abdullah Al-Senussi, both charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, managed to escape. Corpses of 260 supporters of Gadhafi, all apparently shot in their heads, were found in a Sirte hotel, so that Human Rights Watch had to press for an investigation into the circumstances under which the people died. Members of the Gadhafi family filed a lawsuit against NATO in the International Criminal Court, charging the alliance with murder and a crime against humanity. Stating that the mission in Libya was complete, NATO Secretary General nevertheless described it as a top success on the alliance's record, and pledged NATO support for Lybya's new administration. According to a NATO-supplied account, its pilots flew 26,000 missions, 10,000 of them with combat purposes, over the time of the campaign. Typically, 3-4 targets – oftentimes civilian infrastructures - were destroyed per combat mission. A total of over 50,000 Libyans died during the armed conflict. For France and Great Britain, the two countries which contributed most to the opening of the Libyan campaign, its costs reached Euro 300m and Euro 340m accordingly. The leaders of the US, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, as well as the NATO Secretary General, expressed satisfaction in connection with the killing of Gadhafi and confidence that Libya was entering a new phase of the democratic development. The demise of the Gadhafi regime will likely enable the leading Western countries to bite into Libya's impressive energy resources and, additionally, to maintain control over the Libyan accounts in Western banks as Western representatives are likely to be entrusted with handling them by the new Libyan administration. The armed conflict left much of Libya's infrastructures and all of its governance machine in disrepair, prompting, as a side effect, massive legal and illegal immigration from Libya to neighboring and Western countries. It is a huge problem for Libya that large amounts of weaponry – portable air-defense systems and even components of chemical and nuclear warfare, along with ordinary firearms - remained in the possession of its population in the wake of the fighting. From the policy standpoint, it is clear that adepts of politicized Islam, including those of its radical forms, gained admission to Libya's political spectrum owing to the fall of the previous regime. The first resolutions released by the new administration immediately reflected the shift: the Sharia law begins to loom through the Libyan legislation, a ban is imposed on divorces, and polygamy is reinstated as a legal practice.
In Syria, the protests which began in March, 2011 and were powered by demands of better economic conditions and for democratic reforms quickly escalated into fighting with police, and at the moment the conflict is at a high point. Similarly to Libya and in a stark contrast with Tunisia and Egypt, Syria's socioeconomic problems never measured up to a full-blown crisis. Similarly to Libya, Syria's internal conflict is to a large extent externally fueled. The West and Israel regarded Syria as Iran's ally, which is the reason why they started pushing for regime change in Damascus. Turkey and the Persian Gulf countries as opponents of the Shia Iran readily joined the cause. Even though the Syrian administration accepted the opposition's wish list – a sweeping reform of the legislation on political parties, elections, media, and local self-governance plus a constitution reform curbing the powers of Syria's ruling party - in a practically unabridged form, the radical opposition shows no interest in having the tensions cooled. The death toll in Syria since March, 2011 is estimated at around 3,000. It should be noted that large rallies of the supporters of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad do convene in Damascus and other major cities across Syria. The opposition in the country appears to comprise three segments. The first one is the domestic or, in its self-description, patriotic, opposition which demands the implementation of the promised reforms and seems open to a dialog with the administration. The second segment of the opposition in Syria is the external opposition represented by the Syrian National Council established in Turkey in October, 2011. The Council is a coalition of liberals, representatives of the Kurdish community, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter accounting for its most organized and influential component. Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian-French political scientist and a professor of political sociology at Sorbonne University, chairs the Syrian National Council. The top line on the Council's agenda is occupied by ouster of Bashar al-Assad. The third segment counts in its ranks the radical groups of Syrians and foreign mercenaries, including some from Afghanistan, who are known to receive funding and armaments from abroad. Their demands appear to be limited to the displacement of Bashar al-Assad. Syria is under permanent Western pressure over the issue, and the impression is that only the veto imposed by Russia and China in the UN Security Council on the resolution authorizing the campaign akin to the one that was launched in Libya spared Syria a round of NATO air strikes.
Sketchily, two results of the Arab Spring are visible at the moment. First, the politicized Islam strengthened its positions in the countries where entrenched regimes had been brushed off the scene. The advent of the pro-Islam forces should not be discussed in an exclusively alarmist tone – chances are that in Tunisia and Egypt the nations that got rid of the former corrupt regimes will manage to build much better societies based on their traditions which, as a matter of fact, are centered around Islam. The likelihood of the scenario is higher in Egypt, the country with a numerous and politically experienced intellectual class and a serious democratic legacy. The second result is that the post-Arab Spring regimes are not going to be undividedly pro-Western, meaning that the Arab world and, partially, the world as a whole, will have to sustain a completely new political balance…
