Were the Arab populations that rebelled against the tyrannical regimes too optimistic and did they end up slamming against the wall of reality? Are we now witnessing the fall of the Arab Spring's hopes for democracy and building the citizenship states all as a prelude for the return of the military rule? The ongoing events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen indicate that the reality has revealed itself and that the joy of toppling the dictatorships has been replaced by frustration and even despair with the impossibility of coming up with governments enjoying large political bases. The bliss of February 11, 2011 has been replaced with the obscure sight of the sit-in participants in front of the Rabia al-Adawiyya Mosque. In Yemen and Libya, the armed tribes and warlords have surfaced and are now saying that they will not easily leave, contrary to the expectations of the early rebels. Bashar al-Assad's regime wiped out the peaceful activists. Al-Assad then achieved a major success in his efforts at transforming the revolution into a movement that resembles his own regime with respect to the practices and the violations in addition to the use of a clearly sectarian speech in the face of the regime's equally sectarian regime under a cover of secularism and resistance. Because of their good intentions, many rebels believed that Zine al Abidine Ben Ali's and Hosni Mubarak's step down to prevent the bloodshed – or so they said – will be repeated in other Arab countries. However, Muammar Gaddafi clung to power and the war that he launched represented an early sign concerning the different nature of the conflict there: it was a civil conflict rather than a political once. Once again, people with good intentions thought that despite its violent aspect, the fall of Gaddafi would pave the way for a Libyan agreement to build the citizenship state. That was not the case. In other words, the phase of the revolutionary innocence in the Arab world came to an end and was replaced by a complicated "reality" with violent forces having low moral values. All the ailments that the Arab societies were suffering from rose to the surface. All sorts of repressed nationalistic tendencies, tribal tensions, sectarian sentiments and minority fears surfaced up. All the problems that the former regimes had deemed achievements – such as the poor education, the collapse of the elite, the absence of independent journalism and media, and of a revenue-generating economy – emerged and turned into factors hindering the peaceful power transfer to regimes that really represent their people. Several weeks after Morsi's deposition, the Egyptian army is still unable to find a way of dealing with the "authorization" it obtained from the people to confront the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist movement. The Tunisian government and opposition are unable to reach an agreement to fix the crisis that is affecting all the state's institutions amidst growing fears of fundamentalist violence. Meanwhile, Libya is facing an obscure fate where the militias will be playing the role of the state with the latter being unable to pick up its pieces. However, all this does not mean that things will stop there. The development of the Arab societies has shattered the regimes built by the military dictatorships, and it is now impossible to rebuild them. Those parties who criticize the Arab revolutions indicate that things will return to their former state thanks to the new alliances between the military powers and some specific political and social groups. This is perhaps partially correct. However, these alliances are trying to rebuild the old structure without considering the deep transformations launched by the revolutions, which will not stop until they release everything that is hidden in the Arab societies – knowing that everything will not be a pretty sight.
