Instapundit found a New York Post article by scholar Amir Taheri examining the steady fall of the old Near East order. What set it in motion? The fall of Saddam Hussein. Glenn focuses on those implicated by Saddam's well-known, vast network of bribery, but the most important lesson here is that Iraq was, in fact, the correct first target:

In a timid step away from one-party rule, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last month ordered his branch of the Ba'ath to distance itself from the government. In any case, Syria lacks the financial resources of Iraq and is itself dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and Iran among others.

"What matters is to keep the flame of pan-Arabism burning," says Taysir al-Khamsi, leader of Jordan's pro-Saddam faction. "We have lost Iraq to the enemy and must get together not to lose Syria."

[...]

Some Arab pundits believe that the fall of Saddam's regime has spelled the end of Ba'athism as a political factor in the life of the Arabs. "Ba'athism died long ago, maybe as early as 1965 when it became a cover for military juntas," says Saleh al-Qallab, a Jordanian former information minister. "For years, Iraqi money enabled the Ba'ath to maintain a presence. With Saddam gone, that presence will fade."

Damascus is the headquarters for numerous terrorist organizations; Saddam has always had a penchant for outsourcing to radical groups. That Iraqi Ba'athists' prefered military operations are indistinguishable from Hamas, Hezbollah or al Qaeda only underscores the implications of their marked tolerance for and lack of sectarian fighting with radical foreigners in the country. You'd think that two groups purportedly loathing each other more than a common enemy would be wary of one gaining strategic dominance, wouldn't you? But even with each side a far easier target than the Allies, neither seems to mind. Pan-Arabist, Secularist, Socialist, Wahabbi, Fundamentalist Shiite, whatever: totalitarians are totalitarians, and Saddam's fall has upset the region's entire status quo.