In the previous 15 chapters of this series we recalled the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent Persian Gulf War between the United States and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime; the political and social tensions gripping Iran after the Islamic Republic dissolved; the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime during the “Syrian Spring” of 2000; and the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Khadafy. In this final installment, we’ll examine how the political geography of the Middle East has changed since the Khadafy and Assad regimes fell.

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It was a packed house in the Hague the day Muammar Khadafy was officially indicted for crimes against humanity and terrorism-- and a noisy one too, as the fallen Libyan tyrant repeatedly disrupted the indictment hearing with disjointed ravings about his foes and chants meant to incite violence in the courtroom. The judges at his trial got so incensed at his behavior that they nearly ordered a gag placed on him(literally and figuratively) before his defense counsel was finally able to convince him to restrain himself. As it was, the deposed one- time ruler of Libya glared sullenly at the judges of the International Criminal Court while the chief prosecutor at the trial summarized the charges and specifications against Khadafy.

By the time the last charge was read, it was questionable if Khadafy would make it out of the courtroom and back to his prison cell in one piece. The prosecutor’s opening statement painted a picture of Khadafy as a modern-day Ivan the Terrible, a bloodthirsty lunatic who would have total strangers shot on a whim. As the last of the charges against the ex-army colonel turned fallen dictator was being read, an old man whose sons had been hanged on Khadafy’s orders bolted out of the spectators’ gallery and tried to club Khadafy over the head with a wooden cane; others in the courtroom began chanting “Kill him now!” at the top of their collective lungs. A riot nearly erupted before court security personnel finally managed to restore order in the courtroom and hustle a visible shaken Khadafy back to his jail cell. After that day, all trial sessions were held with the courtroom empty of everyone except the prosecution, the defense, the judges, and a modest pool of reporters.

That pool saw a steady parade of Khadafy’s victims enter the courtroom and give heartrending stories of the abuses they’d endured at the hands of his agents. It also saw a host of evidence presented by the prosecution that cemented the picture of the Khadafy regime as onw of the most brutal tyrannies the world had seen since the days of Adolf Hitler; particularly horrifying to the court was a videotape covertly made by anti-Khadafy dissidents in the mid-1990s showing a group of political prisoners being machine-gunned to death along with their families. (And it wasn’t just the judges at the tribunal who found the tape hard to watch; an Associated Press photographer in the press gallery actually became physically ill when viewing the footage and later had to undergo treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.) Khadafy’s defense team desperately tried to explain the video away as a forgery only to have two expert witnesses for the prosecution tear this argument to shreds by testifying to the videotape’s authenticity. Further proof that the video was genuine came in the form of a Libyan expatriate who had been a prison guard at the time the video was made and fled to London shortly after the executions. Having been present when the executions were carried out, he had invaluable knowledge as to the veracity of the videotape’s contents, and his testimony drove a stake through the heart of the defense’s efforts to discredit it.

From this point forward, Khadafy’s fate was sealed. No amount of verbal gymnastics or savaging of prosecution witnesses by the defense team; the only question now was whether the deposed Libyan tyrant was to be executed or sentenced to life in prison. Even many of those who had once supported him were now denouncing his very name as a synonym for evil. At a rally in Benghazi on the day before the verdict in the trial was announced, posters bearing Khadafy’s likeness were trampled by the demonstrators and an effigy of the fallen tyrant was burned in the city’s main square; the protestors’ anger was so intense units of the newly reconstituted Libyan army finally had to be deployed to keep the peace.

The tribunal returned a unanimous “guilty” verdict against the fallen Libyan leader and sentenced him to death by hanging. There was no shortage of people willing to volunteer to work on constructing the gallows where the disgraced colonel would be executed-- some Libyans, in fact, had been building such a gallows in their imaginations for at least twenty or thirty years. All that remained was to put the noose around Khadafy’s neck and pull the lever that would tighten said noose enough to throttle the deposed ruler. The day of the execution itself saw police and army units dispatched to the gallows site to maintain a precarious peace, acting as a human barrier between dueling rallies of multitudes of Khadafy opponents and a handful of the dwindling number of remaining die-hards who still believed in him.

On September 9th, 2001, just over two months after his arrest and the collapse of his regime, Muammar Khadafy was hanged along with three of his senior surviving deputies at a prison compound just west of Tripoli. Few tears were shed over his demise: in fact, the staff of the then just-reopened Egyptian embassy in Libya hosted a dinner party to celebrate the occasion. Khadafy had been considered a mortal threat to Egypt’s security during most of his rule as Libyan dictator, and as far as Cairo was concerned it was good riddance to bad rubbish. If the new Libyan foreign minister had any objections to the dinner party, he kept those objections to himself.

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It’s now been more than a decade since the Assad and Khadafy regimes collapsed, but the reverberations from those uprisings are still being felt today. Indeed, the overthrow of those dictatorships would turn out to be the catalyst for beginning a chain reaction of popular uprisings throughout the Middle East; within two months of Khadafy’s execution, the same rumblings of political discontent that had swept Khadafy out of power in Libya were beginning to assail the Mubarak government in Egypt. In a surprising act of solidarity, the controversial Muslim Brotherhood, officially banned by the Egyptian government for decades, would join forces with Egypt’s largest secular opposition groups to mount a massive protest campaign aimed at forcing Mubarak’s regime to either reform or step aside to make away for a new government that would follow the will of the Egyptian people. Within a matter of weeks after the protest campaign started, the dissention had spread to many sectors of the Egyptian armed forces and even showed a few hints of reaching the lower echelons of Mubarak’s cabinet.

By the spring of 2002 the movement to end Mubarak’s one-party rule had escalated to the point where two of his most senior ministers had resigned and the judges of Egypt’s highest civilian court were on strike in an attempt to force Mubarak himself out of office. Tensions within the police and the military were almost at the breaking point; many foreign embassies in Cairo-- including those of Israel, Britain, and the United States --had gone into security lockdown to guard their personnel against becoming casualties of what Middle East history and political analysts were increasingly seeing as the inevitable eruption of the strains between Mubarak and his opponents into full-blown riots or even civil war.

And there was indeed some measure of violence in the streets of Cairo in the last weeks before the Mubarak government collapsed. One of the worst such outbreaks happened in late May of 2002, when 50 civilians were killed in the crossfire of a 45-minute-long gun battle between security forces loyal to the regime and a dissident group that had gone over to the dissidents’ side. But for the most part the fall of Mubarak’s regime was a rather quiet affair as these things usually go in the Middle East; the end came on June 8th with a brief six-minute televised statement by Mubarak announcing his resignation as Egyptian president and the formation of a caretaker government to administrate the country until new elections could be held.

The collapse of one-party rule in Egypt accelerated the process of political change which had already been steadily transforming the Middle East since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Pro-democracy groups elsewhere in the region had taken careful note of the success of the protest movements in Egypt and Syria and the anti-Khadafy revolution in Libya, and they resolved to apply the lessons of those uprisings to their own struggles for political reform. They also took inspiration from the Iranian guerrilla war to liberate Iran from Iraqi occupation during the late 1980s and early ‘90s. By 2004 new governments were in power in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Qatar and the ruling monarchy in Saudi Arabia was facing substantial pressure for political reform. In March of 2005 Jordan’s new king, Abdullah II, approved a series of reforms to his country’s constitution that granted increased political powers to Jordan’s prime minister and national parliament. Even Qatar, which had been an absolute monarchy for generations, was experiencing the first hints of a protest movement within its borders by 2007.

But not all of the political changes in the Middle East over the last decade have been for the better. One unintended consequence of the reform movements that have swept the region in recent years is the growth in size and influence of hard-line Islamist parties in nearly every country from Algeria to Dubai. The phenomenon is most noticeable in Iran, where nearly thirty years after the collapse of the Islamic Republic a new generation of fundamentalist believers is advocating a return to the theocratic system of government that marked the Khomeini era. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, already a controversial figure to begin with thanks to his past support for the Islamic Revival Party, has stirred up even an greater uproar by vocally and publicly embracing the young fundamentalists’ cause in several recent media appearances.

There are also ominous hints coming from Saudi Arabia that the country’s age-old monarchy is under threat from a large and steadily expanding Islamist movement that advocates dismantling the monarchy and replacing it with a Khomeini-style theocracy. Should that goal be achieved, it would pose a serious security and economic threat to the West-- particularly the United States, which imports at least half of its oil from Saudi Arabia every year and has long-standing defense and trade pacts with the kingdom. A theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia, if it ever came to pass, would even endanger the survival of Israel, the United States’ primary Middle East ally.

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