Challenged by popular resistance movements that are difficult to suppress and won’t be bought off, decrepit and desperate regimes throughout the Arab world are, in effect, engaged in committing serial suicide. By demonstrating their incapacity and unworthiness to govern, they forfeit legitimacy. Whether the end comes quickly or slowly, is messy or neat, it comes. In Tunisia and Egypt, it already has. In Yemen, the timetable appears set. In Bahrain, Syria and perhaps elsewhere, the clock is ticking, loudly and insistently. Although Libya’s Kadafi is testing the proposition that brute force can turn back that clock, his efforts are doomed to fail. Even if he “wins” the ongoing civil war, victory will leave Kadafi a pariah, with his regime living on borrowed time.
