the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war . Revolutions and revolts -- finished and ongoing -- must be depriving many rulers of a good night 's sleep . The citizens of the Arab world have finally had enough of the tired charades of the past . Increasingly endangered are the sham referendums where presidents won 99 percent of votes , where hardly anyone took the time to cast a ballot , the `` parties '' that were little more than mafias with empty slogans , and the state intelligence thugs who were a law unto themselves . That stuff just does n't cut it anymore . As we strolled together through a ransacked intelligence headquarters in Sabha , Libya , a few months ago , one man told me : `` We used to fear our rulers . Now they fear us . '' This year almost every Arab state , from the Atlantic to the Gulf , has had to at least go through the motions of initiating political reform . And while they 'd be loathe to share their true motivations , I suspect Arab rulers did n't vote against Syria because they are new converts to people power or
Cairo -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- I strolled through the halls of the Arab League 's headquarters in Cairo the other day , perusing all the family photos of Arab leaders at various summit meetings over the years . There was deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak , deposed and violently disposed of Libyan `` Brother Leader '' Moammar Gadhafi , exiled Tunisian President Zine Abedine Ben Ali , Yemen 's beleaguered President Ali Abdullah Saleh , and Syria 's embattled President Bashar Al-Assad . Uneasy , I thought , must sit the other heads of state featured in those photos . But it was those surviving leaders , of such less-than-democratic countries as Saudi Arabia , Algeria and Sudan , to name a few , who instructed their foreign ministers to vote Saturday to suspend Syria from the Arab League over its bloody suppression of the eight-month-old uprising there . In the final months of 2011 , the future is looking very uncertain for the creaking Arab political order . Egypt and Tunisia are no longer solid , reliable members of the bloc of conservative , pro-Western `` moderate '' Arab regimes the United States cobbled together in the aftermath of