Facing tenacious uprisings, the leaders of Syria, Libya and Yemen must have thought of their own possible fates when they saw their onetime peer Hosni Mubarak in a defendant cage, on trial for charges that could carry a death sentence.
For the three authoritarian Arab leaders, the choices are limited: Cling to power at any cost, negotiate immunity or find a foreign haven.
All those options make it harder to resolve their countries' turmoil peacefully.
Syria's Bashar Assad, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh are likely to step up violence, judging that they must wipe out the uprisings against them to ensure their own protection. If negotiations do occur, they are even more certain than before to demand that any deal include immunity or safe exile. And their opponents, more determined than ever to see their leaders in the same dock as Mubarak, may be less likely to accept those conditions.
"That's the lesson Arab leaders have learned: Mubarak gave up too easily (and) without a fight," said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. "They think Mubarak was soft."
Mubarak stepped down 11 February after an 18-day uprising that left 850 protesters dead. Assad, Gadhafi and Saleh show no sign of giving up power even after several months of bloody internal strife.
As Mubarak's trial opened Wednesday, Syrian forces stepped up an already ferocious assault to crush protesters in the city of Hama in a campaign that has killed at least 100 people this week.
The governments of other Arab nations were clearly unsettled by the message sent by Mubarak's trial that long-unquestioned leaders can be punished.
Many government television stations around the region, particularly in the kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, did not have live broadcasts of Wednesday's historic, four-hour opening session of the Mubarak trial.
Still, on pan-Arab satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera, their citizens could follow every moment of the trial and the images of the ailing, 83-year-old Mubarak in his hospital bed in the courtroom cage.
"Throughout the Arab world, we will see citizens relieved to see a fair trial of a former president who was a tyrant and an oppressor," wrote Egyptian analyst and political activist Amr Hamzawi in Cairo's Al-Shorouk daily. "Others will find inspiration in the Egyptian revolution to continue their own in the hope of freedom, democracy and social justice."
Mubarak, accused of corruption and of ordering the killings of protesters, is the first leader to be tried by his own people in the modern Arab world. That feat eclipses the trial of Iraq's Saddam Hussein because the process that led to his conviction and execution was supervised by the US.
The protesters in the heat of the Mideast's uprisings looked at Mubarak and saw their own leaders.
"Bashar Assad has done much worse than Mubarak, so our job is more difficult and needs more time, but one day he will sit in a cage, too, and pay the price of his crimes," said a protester from the Syrian city of Homs who didn't want to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Even before the trial in Egypt, Assad showed no sign of backing down in his brutal crackdown against protesters. In fact, the repression has gotten more vicious. About 1,700 civilians have been killed since the uprising began nearly five months ago.
In Libya, a spokesman for the rebels' National Transitional Council pledged that "Gadhafi will meet the same fate as Mubarak."
"He should learn the moral of what happened to Mubarak," said the spokesman, Shamseldeen Abdul-Mawlah.
Yemen provides the most nuanced situation, after six months of massive protests.
Saleh would in theory seem the most receptive to the "lesson of Mubarak" and be the closest to snapping up the chance for a safe exit. He already is effectively in exile, recuperating in Saudi Arabia from wounds suffered in a bombing at his compound in the capital. International mediators have even hammered out a deal giving him immunity in return for stepping down.
But the mercurial Saleh has proved almost mind-bogglingly stubborn, perhaps a sign of how inconceivable it is for any leader to go willingly. With his cronies still in power in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, he has refused to resign or to sign the international deal, and insists he will return home to rule.
And his opponents are now even more determined.
"What happened in Egypt is filling us with motivation to do more," said Ahmed Nayef, one of the protest leaders.
