The huge plume of black smoke rising above oil refinery in the rebel-held city of Ras Lanuf, the result of air strikes Wednesday by the Libyan government, seemed to mark an ominous escalation in what has all the makings of a protracted Libyan civil war. Though the country’s spontaneous democratic revolution made lightning progress in liberating a large swath of the eastern Libya from the dictatorship of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and took the town of Ras Lanuf several days ago, it’s untrained volunteer militia has since balked in the face of the well-equipped remnants of the Libyan army that has stayed loyal to Gaddafi. Most importantly, the rebels lack armor and air support, and have been pinned down by government attack helicopters, fighter jets, and bombers. The attack on the oil refinery today suggests Gaddafi’s willingness to use his air superiority to target the country’s infrastructure in rebel-held territory, whatever the cost.

The rebel government, located just a few hours drive from Ras Lanuf in Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, used the refinery attack to highlight what they say is the need for immediate international intervention in the form of a no-fly zone over Libya. “We believe that the international community won’t stand by and let this regime annihilate its people,” said Hafiz Ghoga, spokesman for the National Libyan Council, the provisional rebel government. The council also suggested that if attacks on Libya’s oil infrastructure continue, there would be both economic and environmental consequences for the whole world. And should the international community fail to act, the revolutionary government itself would begin procuring the necessary weapons to fight Gaddafi’s army. “We have the money, and we don don’t expect any country to refuse our people assistance in defending themselves,” said Ghoga.

But behind the scenes, the rebel government appears to be less sanguine about their chances for survival without international intervention. “The No-Fly Zone is crucial,” one rebel official told TIME. “Without it, they’re just going to keep killing us.” And the National Libyan Council appears divided over political alternatives to carrying on an against-the-odds military struggle whatever the costs. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Tuesday, former Justice Minister current head of the National Libyan Council Mustafa Abdel-Jalil that he was in negotiations and offered Gaddafi 72 hours to leave Libya with guarantees of safe passage. But Ghoga, speaking officially on behalf of the council, said that there would be no negotiations with the regime, and no immunity would be given to Gaddafi. “No one has the right to deny justice to the victims of this regime,” he said on Tuesday.

Regardless of where the rebels stand, Gaddafi is pushing forward. Besides air strikes in the east, Gaddafi’s forces are continuing a brutal siege of the pro-revolution city of Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, using heavy weapons on an apparently lightly-armed civilian population, according to what few news reports emerge from the city. And in another rambling televised address Wednesday morning, Gaddafi once again accused al-Qaeda of orchestrating the uprising, and threatened to fight any country that participates in a No-Fly Zone.

Besides the ongoing loss of life, a protracted civil war in Libya could have a number of implications. Libya supplies European countries with significant percentages of their crude oil imports (Ireland 23.3%; Italy, 22%; Switzerland, 18.7%; France 15.7%; Greece, 14.6%); many governments are also worried and prospect of a tidal wave of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Libya. And though Gaddafi’s claim that al-Qaeda is leading the revolution is a baseless attempt to de-legitimize a popular uprising, the longer the battle continues, the greater are the chances that it becomes a magnet for violent extremists. That could dilute the very important aspect of the transformational power that the Arab democracy uprisings are having in the region, doing peacefully in a matter of weeks what violent extremists have been unable to do for years: topple secular Arab dictators. But in Libya, people power alone may not be enough.

The whipping sandstorms, low visibility, and stray camels make the five-hour car ride from Benghazi to the oil refinery town of Ras Lanuf a tense one even in normal times. But these days there is nothing normal going on in Ras Lanuf, which lies on the front lines of the clashes between Libya’s volunteer rebel army and forces loyal to the country’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. On Saturday when TIME visited, the gates of Ras Lanuf were guarded by a platoon of opposition irregulars with anti-aircraft guns and recoilless rifles mounted onto the backs of pickup trucks.

But calling this a front-line may overstate the level of organization and planning behind the rebel advance. Though opposition forces have been slowly moving west from their stronghold in Benghazi along the about 700-mile coastal highway to Tripoli, the country’s capital and the center of Gaddafi’s power, Ras Lanuf has changed hands several times. As has Bin Jawad, the next town west down the coastal highway. And looking at the leaderless bands of pick-up trucks gathering at checkpoints to make fresh sorties on government positions with weapons newly acquired from raided government arsenals that they barely know how to use, it’s hard to think of this as anything like a conventional army. But what’s clear is Libya’s desert geography — and Muammar Gaddafi’s attempt to violently suppress what was once a peaceful movement — has transformed the country’s pro-democracy uprising into the first military campaign of the Arab Spring. And it’s also clear the desert is an arena in which people power plays at a disadvantage.

For a dictatorship that’s been in power for 42 years, the Libyan government collapsed with remarkable speed in the eastern part of the country — a handful of days around February 17th. Besides the fact that Benghazi has long been a hotbed of dissent to rule from Tripoli, the terrain of the east — hills, forests, and a daisy chain of relatively dense urban centers along the coast — is also more sympathetic to a revolution. But west of Benghazi, the land flattens out, with the white sand of the Mediterranean shoreline giving way quickly to juniper and sage scrub and a seemingly endless expanse of dirt and discarded plastic bags. Towns along the way are small, easy to garrison, spread far apart, and located at highway intersections, or clustered around oil facilities.

If eastern Libya is guerrilla country, central Libya is tank terrain. Some of the great battles of World War Two were fought by legendary Axis and Allied tank commanders over the course of several years in a back-and-forth war along the north African coast between Tunisia and Egypt. Of course, nothing like the scale of those battles is going to occur in the Libyan civil war. Only the forces that remain loyal to the Gaddaffi regime have anything resembling a modern army. But therein lies the problem for the opposition. Though much of the Libyan military — already under-funded by a suspicious Gaddafi, who lavished money and materiel on his personal security forces instead — defected to the opposition camp, it has been unable to impose any authority or organization on the rebellion’s volunteers who have been doing most of the fighting. And without air support and armor, speeding down straight desert highways with no cover is almost suicide.

Indeed, given their lack of discipline and training it’s incredible there aren’t more self-inflicted casualties. Besides the usual bouts of idiotic celebratory gunfire, among the many nerve wracking scenes of boys playing with dangerous toys that TIME witnessed near Ras Lanuf included a youngster sitting on top of a huge heap of ammunition boxes at a highway checkpoint and nearly knocking over an open artillery shell crate just so he could get more comfortable. And though the opposition claims an explosion at an ammunition depot near Benghazi that killed more than 20 people on Friday was the work of government saboteurs, it could just as likely have been the result of an accident. Meanwhile, though the Libyan government forces fled Benghazi in disarray, they appear to have regained a measure of composure, and according to reports, have dug into Bin Jawad with sniper positions backed by artillery, helicopters, and fighter jets. Fighting will get even tougher if the rebels move closer to Sert, Gaddaff’s hometown, located about midway between Benghazi and Tripoli.

Just how long Free Libya’s desert campaign will last is anyone’s guess. During the North African campaign in WWII, supply lines proved crucial. When the Allied air and sea power cut fuel deliveries to German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Arfika Corps, its Panzer tanks ran out of gas in a region where, ironically, some of the world’s largest oil fields were later discovered. Nowadays the rebel government says it has enough cash to pay salaries for the next two months. It’s asking foreign countries to begin recognizing it as Libya’s legitimate authority, a prelude to formally asking oil companies to begin paying them rather than the government in Tripoli. The Benghazi government also says at least one national oil company, the Sert Oil Company located in Ras Lanuf, has broken with Tripoli and sided with the rebels, and the refineries at Ras Lunuf were refueling opposition vehicles free of charge. The rebels are also getting foreign donations of food and medicine delivered to Benghazi’s port. “This isn’t Darfur, there’s not going to be a humanitarian crisis here,” said one rebel government spokesman in Benghazi . “But let’s not kid ourselves. This is a revolution by amateurs. We can’t keep doing this forever.”

Morale may end up playing the decisive factor in this conflict — though it can’t be too high on the Gaddafi side as they shoot on their own people, amid rumors that many soldiers are ordered to fight by their officers at gunpoint. But the regime and its supporters are fighting for their survival. Swift sanctions, asset freezes and threats from international bodies to investigate the regime for crimes against humanity have given the government little incentive to surrender peacefully.

The rebellion too is fighting for its life. Though the Arab League has offered to help broker negotiations, the opposition says there is nothing to discuss and fears that any return by the regime will be the beginning of a massacre. But fear is in short supply among the rebel volunteers, many of whom believe that their miraculous against-the-odds successes are a sign that God is on their side. After an attack helicopter appeared and began rocketing the vicinity, TIME beat a hasty retreat from Ras Lanuf back to Benghazi. But car after car of young men with guns and flags of the old Libyan monarchy, which has become the new emblem of Free Libya, kept speeding down the other side of the highway to fill the breach. One truck was also flying the skull and cross-bones of a Jolly Roger pirate flag, which perhaps better captured the wild spirit of the rebel campaign, which may yet tilt in their favor. As one veteran of north African desert battles, American General George Patton, said: “Nobody ever defended anything successfully. There is only attack and attack, and attack some more.”

With names like the Cafe Venizia, Mundo, and Hot Hot Coffee, the espresso bars on seemingly every block of Benghazi are a pleasant legacy of Italy’s otherwise largely brutal occupation of Libya in the 1930’s. Another is the string of neo-baroque municipal buildings, art-deco cinemas and shopping arcades that the Italian city planners linked up to the old Ottoman-era town with a series of avenues and squares. Independence in 1951 and the oil boom in the 1970’s left their own marks on Benghazi, in the form of surprisingly stylish renditions of the architectural fads of the day, Brutalist banks and International Style hotels. And though most of this huge country is desert, Benghazi is surrounded by green hills, white beaches, and blue waters. Under the influence of a few too many cappuccini — alcohol is banned in Libya — it’s easy to imagine some glossy travel magazine of the era branding this stretch of North Africa as the Libyan Riviera.

But the sober reality is that Benghazi, now a symbol of resistance to the rule of Colonel Mummar Gaddafi, is also a symbol of that dictator’s abuse, megalomania, and incompetence. The once beautiful downtown is a skeleton of its former self, with monuments surrounded by scaffolding that never comes down, empty office buildings, and decrepit apartment blocks. Outside of downtown, the pavement stops just off the highway, and dirt streets fill with rotting garbage. The city of one million has one sewage treatment plant, built more than 40 years ago. Waste is just flushed into the ground or the sea, and when the water table rises in winter, the streets become open cesspools. Benghazi, the second largest city in a country with vast oil wealth and a tiny population, is rotting in its own fifth. “Why do we have to live like this?” says, Rafiq Marrakis, a professor of architecture and urban planning at Benghazi’s Garyounis University, Libya’s oldest, who took TIME on a tour of Benghazi’s sad decline. “There’s no planning, no infrastructure, no society. Gaddafi has billions and billions in banks all over the world. But he’s left us here with nothing.”

Most Libyans suffered under Gaddafi’s capricious rule. His support for radical leftist militant groups in Europe and the Middle East sparked international sanctions that lasted until 2006, when Libya formally ended its weapons of mass destruction programs in exchange for international rehabilitation. His economic policies — laid out in his famous Green Book, which purports to chart a third way between Communism and liberal democracy but in fact cloaked an autocracy with a thousand toothless committees — were just as destructive. Gaddafi banned much private enterprise and turned over property from landlords to their tenants. While this benefited Libya’s underclass in the short term, it meant that there has been almost no investment in maintaining the country’s housing stock. “All of this is collapsing on the inside,” says Marrakis, pointing to apartment buildings along Gamal Abdel Nasser street, once among the city’s most prestigious addresses, now more reminiscent of Soviet bloc eastern Europe than of the breezy Mediterranean. “There is a severe, chronic housing shortage,” he continues. “Young people can’t own their own homes, can’t get married, can’t start their lives.”

Benghazi felt the particular brunt of Gaddaffi’s neglect, in part because the city has a history of defiance to central rule from the capital, in Tripoli. (Ironically, the uprising of military officers that brought Qaddaffi to power in 1969 began in Benghazi.) Gaddafi leveled the old bazaar, the heart of the Arab city and the center of civic life, and carved out a swath of prime real estate for an arsenal, parade ground and villa-studded pleasure dome for his elite security forces. And what social welfare projects the regime did undertake, such as a medical center with the pompously literal name “One Thousand Two Hundred Bed Hospital” became white elephants. “They’ve been building it for more than 40 years and it still isn’t finished,” says Marrakis. “Huge hospitals like this are obsolete now anyway. [But] all he cared about was his own glory.”

The neglect of the city’s infrastructure became one of the major reasons why Benghazi turned against the government. With the opening of the country since 2003, Libyans began to learn more about the outside world and realized that they were being shortchanged. The example of the rapid development of the Persian Gulf countries, particularly the Emirati city-sate of Dubai — which doesn’t even have much oil wealth of its own — into world-class economies, was particularly galling. “How is it that they are in the desert, in harsh conditions, but have performed miracles, while we have a wonderful climate and all these resources and are going nowhere,” says Marrakis. “[Meanwhile] the young people get YouTube and see how one of Gaddafi’s sons spent a million dollars to have Beyoncé perform at his party.”

In the last three years, the regime began realizing that its neglect of the city was reaching a crisis point, and the government brought in a slew of foreign construction companies with Chinese, Malaysian and Filipino workers to build badly planned suburban mega-tenements. “They realized they were running out of time,” says Marrakis. But it was too little too late for the dispossessed young people — more than half of Libyans are under the age of 30 — who took to the streets on Feb. 17 and drove Gaddafi’s forces out of Benghazi.

Now Marrakis and many of the other intelligensia who have formed a new provisional government are hoping that Free Libya will turn Benghazi into the tourist mecca that its geography and history could so easily make it. “I’ve been all over Europe and Asia and haven’t seen beaches like we have here; Greek and Roman cities,” says Marrakis, who once lived in Seattle and got his doctorate from the University of Washington. “We had a golden opportunity and Gaddafi squandered it. This time we will do it correctly.”

Meanwhile, the city has a least one new attraction. The burned-out villas, fortresses, and jails of Gaddafi’s pampered and brutal security services — conquered by Benghazi’s street kids — where the city’s families are now lining up to see for the first time how their overlords lived.

It’s easy to find the headquarters of the Libyan opposition in Benghazi, the country’s second city and the hotbed of the uprising against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Just head down to the Corniche, the city’s Mediterranean waterfront, and follow the cheering crowds hanging Gaddafi in effigy to the city’s district courthouse, where the revolution began on Feb. 17 as a protest by the city’s lawyers and judges. But once inside the now battle-scarred and graffitied building, it’s hard to figure out who, exactly, is in charge.

Scores of newly minted revolutionary officials — middle-aged volunteers from the city’s professional and business classes — have many meetings but appear to make few decisions. They hold press conferences in what used to be a courtroom, while about a dozen opposition spokesmen roam the halls trying to be helpful but often offering conflicting information. Trucks full of eggs and baby formula arrive at the courthouse doors without an apparent system for delivering them to the needy and without clear reports of shortages. And though spirits are high, especially among the young volunteers sporting Che Guevara–style berets, the institutional vibe is more like that of a steering committee of a future liberal-arts college than of a guerrilla movement gearing up for a long fight. “The problem is that we don’t have anyone with any political experience whatsoever,” says Iman Bugahaighis, a professor of dentistry now acting as an unofficial spokesperson. “We didn’t have any institutions other than regime. That was part of Gaddafi’s plan: to make everyone loyal only to him.”

Perhaps sensing the vacuum, former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who resigned from the Gaddafi government only a week ago, told al-Jazeera television on Saturday that he’s in charge of a transitional government that will pave the way for elections in three months, that could possibly negotiate with the regime and that might even end up splitting the country between the opposition-controlled east and the government-controlled west. (He also told al-Jazeera that Gaddafi has chemical and nuclear weapons, a claim that military commanders sympathetic to the opposition told TIME was highly unlikely.)

But a new revolutionary committee that just announced its existence on Sunday undermined Abdel Jalil’s claim to leadership. Calling itself the National Libyan Council, its members claim to be an umbrella group representing the many local committees that spontaneously formed in the past 10 days to liberate the country city by city. However, a 30-minute question-and-answer session with the foreign press showed that the committee is still very much a work in progress, with its actual membership, selection criteria and most of its agenda yet to be announced. And though the National Libyan Council appeared to be working with Abdel Jalil, and may even include him, it made it clear that that the views expressed by the former Justice Minister — such as his apparent willingness to negotiate with the regime — did not necessarily represent the opposition. “These are personal opinions of Mr. Mustafa [Abdel Jalil],” said Ghoga. “The principle of negotiation with a human-rights violator is an issue for the whole council to discuss. In my personal opinion, there’s no room to negotiate.” Moreover, any discussion of elections or other constitutional matters was premature while Tripoli, the capital, remained in Gaddafi’s control. But at least one thing the National Libyan Council did agree upon, according to Ghoga, was that Libya should be united and free from Gaddafi. “The word is out,” he said. “Libya is one society and one nation. The capital is in Tripoli and it will always be in Tripoli.”

Though it’s understandable that Libya’s leaderless revolution is in some state of disarray a mere 10 days after it began, the consequences could be severe. The Gaddafi regime has enough of its security apparatus intact in Tripoli, and it seems sure enough of its survival that it invited a junket of foreign press to the capital on Saturday in an attempt to control some of the damage to its international reputation caused by reports that it systematically used deadly force against peaceful demonstrations. So now in Benghazi, the opposition is growing increasingly worried that the regime may launch a counterattack to retake liberated territory, order an aerial bombardment or activate sleeper cells to terrorize the city.

But the opposition has yet to detain former regime members or set up security checkpoints inside Benghazi. On Saturday, the opposition’s media center began issuing handwritten badges to foreign media and volunteers, but besides that and one metal detector at the courthouse, there’s very little to prevent trained intelligence operatives from dealing a major blow to the nascent opposition government. “We know we are infiltrated,” says Bugahaighis. “We might be assassinated at any time.”

Nor does there appear to be much in the way of a military strategy for completing the revolution, aside from hoping that Tripoli will liberate itself as Benghazi did. There was some debate among officials about whether or not the committee should start a military committee in order to coordinate the volunteer soldiers willing to travel to Tripoli, though it also appeared to want to leave such matters in the hands of army commanders who had sided with the revolution. “The army has been with the revolution since the beginning, so we have full confidence in it,” said Ghoga.

But it’s also not exactly clear who’s commanding the parts of the military that have turned against the regime or how significant a military force those units represent. In an interview with TIME on Friday at an air base on the outskirts of Benghazi, Colonel Tarek Saad Hussein said he was coordinating volunteers and soldiers to lead a large-scale march on Tripoli. But on Saturday, Brigadier General Mohamed Hassan Mahanna, who identified himself as the head of air defense in eastern Libya, said he had never heard of a Colonel Hussein. And in turn, it’s not clear how much of an air defense there actually is in eastern Libya. Another air force colonel told TIME that at the outbreak of the uprising, the regime moved most military aircraft from eastern Libya to Sert, Gaddafi’s hometown and a government stronghold on the central coast.

And yet, volunteers continue to show up at military bases around Benghazi, including a former army accounting office that’s now run by a ragtag band of volunteers wearing newly acquired green fatigues and wielding a few captured automatic weapons and the occasional shotgun and hunting rile. “Every day, kids come here and say, ‘Please let us go to Tripoli,’ and we’re just waiting for the orders to go,” says the newly appointed commanding officer, an air-force pilot. “We don’t need a plan,” says one of his men, a former mechanic. “We’ll liberate Tripoli with our hearts.”

There’s a not-so secret password that gets foreign journalists coming from Egypt into Libya through customs and immigration without showing passports and through the neighborhood militia checkpoints on the coastal road from Tobruk west to Benghazi. Flash the “Victory” sign with two fingers, and as long as you are in Free Libya, the eastern half of the country controlled by the democratic opposition to the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and you’ll get saluted right back and then hurried along your way.

Opposition supporters in eastern Libya are making every effort to battle the tight controls that the government has put upon information coming out of Libya, claiming that the media blackout hides the crimes and killings the government has committed against its own people. From taxi drivers offering free rides, and average citizens offering food and lodging, to the new revolutionary committees setting up press centers, Libyans have welcomed the international media with open arms, and almost everyone has a message they want to get out to the world. “You can’t believe how happy I am to meet an American reporter,” says Omar, an airline pilot from Benghazi, who took me to his home so I could have a warm place to write, made me lunch and played me country-western music. “The government was massacring us and there was no one here to see,” he says.

After the uprising against the Gaddafi regime started, the government shut down access to the Internet, blocked international phone calls out of the country, jammed satellite phone signals, and even forced people leaving the country from the western border crossings to Tunisia to erase their photographs and mobile phone videos of the protests. On Friday, the regime flew a very small number of journalists into the capital city Tripoli, located in western Libya and still the center of government’s military and security apparatus, for a brief one day-long tour of the city. One journalist reported being assaulted by a pro-Gaddafi street marcher, who quickly apologized. The government also declared that any journalist inside the country not on the approved tour would be considered to be a member of al-Qaeda.

But in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city and the epicenter of the uprising, the new revolutionary government is treating journalists not like terrorists but as brothers-in-arms. English-speaking volunteer translators have thronged to a new media center housed in the soot-stained former appeals court building, which days ago had been the scene of a battle between opposition supporters and the remnants of Gaddafi’s security forces in Benghazi. Inside, young men have set up computer workstations to make press passes for anyone who shows a foreign passport. They are also designing anti-Gaddafi posters and caricatures, and preparing to distribute much more sobering images depicting what they say is evidence of crimes against humanity by the Gaddafi government.

On Friday, at the Benghazi revolutionary committee’s first press conference, Peter Bouckert, the emergencies director of Human Rights Watch who is part of a two-person team in the city, said that the opposition’s claims are justified. He estimates that at least 300 people died violently in Benghazi during the uprising, based on actual body counts from hospitals and morgues. “It’s a very conservative figure, and it’s going to rise as the investigation continues,” he said. “What happened here was much more serious than what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. We are talking about the government using live ammunition in a systemic campaign against peaceful demonstrations. There’s also pretty clear evidence of the use of heavy weapons including anti-aircraft guns, which were turned against the people. The results were pretty horrific.”

Meanwhile, the city’s new government — led by a 13 member council of lawyers, judges and professors — wanted to reassure the world that the uprising was committed to democratic principles and that there would be no need for foreign military intervention. What Libya needs, said Hafiz Ghoga, the council’s spokesman, was short-term humanitarian assistance, an international freeze on assets belonging to the Gaddafi family, and a no-flight zone to keep the whatever’s left of the air force from turning on the people. “There is no mess in Libya except where the regime is still in power,” said Ghoga.

But besides Tripoli, one critical area that remains in the control of the regime is Sert, Gaddafi’s hometown, located about midway on the 700 mile costal road from Benghazi to Tripoli. Because Sert may be among the last of Gaddafi strongholds to fall, and because the only alternative land route from Benghazi to Tripoli winds for days through the Sahara desert, it may be sometime before most of the international press can witness whatever desperate battles are occurring between the government and the opposition in the capital. So far, only the New York Times has a reporter sending dispatches out of the capital. But Libya’s revolutionary volunteers will no doubt do their best to get us there, as Omar, my airline pilot host, promised me. “As soon as the airports open, I’ll fly you to Tripoli myself,” he says.

On the same day that the streets of Cairo and Alexandria erupted in ecstatic celebration of the success of a people-power revolution in driving President Hosni Mubarak from power, Iranians were also in their country’s streets — celebrating the 32nd anniversary of their own revolution, in typical resistance-chic style. Huge crowds gathered in Freedom Square on Feb. 11 despite snow and rain, carrying flowers and posters of the Supreme Leader Ayatullah Khamenei, “Down with Israel” placards and the tricolor red, white and green flags of the Islamic Republic. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived by helicopter to a rock-star greeting from the faithful young men who surged against police barricades, shouting, “Ahmadinejad is our life! Ahmadinejad is our President!” while marching bands struck up revolutionary anthems. This year, everyone knew that Iran’s government has more to celebrate than usual.

The Egyptian uprising has brought down one of the U.S.’s key allies in its Middle East cold war with Iran. That’s why soldiers in Tehran handed out Egyptian flags to the crowd and many anti-Mubarak slogans and cartoons were on display — including one of protesters pulling down a statue of Mubarak much in the same way that American tanks had taken down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003. “The sword will bring you down from your palaces of oppression with the help of God,” Ahmadinejad told the crowd. “Very soon, the new Middle East will have no Israel and no America. The new Middle East will have no superpowers.”

Along with the strategic value of seeing an American-backed dictatorship fall, Tehran has sensed an ideological opportunity. The revolutionaries who created the Islamic Republic in 1979 saw themselves as beginning a world revolution of oppressed people under the banner of Islam. Now the Iranian government is claiming that the Egyptian uprising is the first Islamic revolution since 1979 and is giving Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood credit for starting it — claims strenuously repudiated by the Egyptian group.

Still, the Egyptian uprising presents a potential problem for the Iranian government. Opposition protesters from the Green Movement that had led protests against the disputed presidential elections in 2009 have petitioned the government to allow demonstrations on Monday, Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — in support of the prodemocracy movement in Egypt. Iranian opposition leaders, who say the TV images from Tahrir Square mirror their own clashes with authorities in Tehran, hope that the government’s support for the Egyptian uprising will force it to allow Monday’s demonstrations.

Whatever happens on Monday, there’s little chance of events in Egypt reigniting Iran’s Green Movement protests. The Tehran government has demonstrated the will and ability to shut down street protests, and the Green Movement is unlikely to inspire turnout similar to those of 2009. Moreover, the Ahmadinejad government seems ever more secure in its position, having outmaneuvered conservative critics in parliament and the Foreign Ministry. But the Iranian government appears to recognize the need to address some of the economic grievances facing young people in both Egypt and Iran. In his speech on Friday, Ahmadinejad expounded at length on Iran’s scientific advancements, promising to both continue its nuclear program for civilian purposes and put an Iranian in space within the next decade. He also promised to end youth unemployment by 2013. “Once Iran was known only for pistachios and handicrafts,” he said. “Now we are known for nanotechnology.”

The largely passive Egyptian army defends just the outer perimeter of the prodemocracy demonstrations in Tahrir Square against the gangs of supporters of President Hosni Mubarak who lurk on the periphery of central Cairo. Inside the square, security is provided by a volunteer army. Young men search bags, give a light frisk and ask everyone passing through to hold up their ID cards to ensure that no plainclothes government agents have infiltrated the crowd. They are all polite. “We are very sorry” is a common refrain. “This is for your safety.” Many are religious, with thick beards, some with quarter-sized forehead bruises that mark fervent praying. Though they don’t always admit it when asked, many are members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist group that is Egypt’s largest political organization.

Though the Brotherhood didn’t participate in the initial demonstration on Jan. 25 organized by human-rights activists that sparked Egypt’s democracy uprising, its role has been increasing ever since, especially in the front lines of the rock-throwing battles with government supporters. Ironically, the Egyptian government, which initially tried to discredit the protests by blaming them on the Brotherhood (a tactic the government has used often in the past to win foreign support for repressing dissent) is in part responsible for bolstering its position. Having faced government repression for years, the Brotherhood’s devotees were among the best prepared for the wave of violence meted out by the government. “All the liberal and leftist groups aren’t organized, but the Brotherhood is organized,” says Malek Labib, an Egyptian doctoral student who had returned from university in France to spend several nights in the square during the worst of the attacks, bringing water and rocks to the frontline fighters. “They’re not the majority, but they’re the most courageous.

As of Sunday, Feb. 6, the Brotherhood has made a political breakthrough as well. Departing from 30 years of official policy, the Egyptian government included the Brotherhood among the array of opposition groups invited to talk with Vice President Omar Suleiman, the Mubarak regime’s new front man. After the talks ended without progress, some opposition groups muted their previous demand that President Mubarak leave immediately, but Brotherhood officials vowed to continue the protests until Mubarak resigns.

Still, the newfound prominence of the Brotherhood has added to the long-held concern among American policymakers and their Israeli allies that a collapse of the Mubarak regime could be the beginning of a slippery slope toward a Islamist takeover of Egypt — much like the Islamic Revolution in Iran or the Hamas takeover of Gaza — and the renunciation of the U.S.-brokered Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Think tanks sympathetic to Israel and U.S. Jewish groups have begun circulating memos and talking points among opinion makers that cite some of the Islamist group’s many incendiary anti-Israeli comments in recent years as well as examples of the Brotherhood’s links to Hamas. “We will continue to raise the banner of jihad — two swords and a Koran — as long as the Zionists raise their flag, with two blue stripes to represent their so-called state,” said Brotherhood leader Muhammad Badi in 2010, according to the Washington Institute of Near Eastern Affairs.

But such language is at odds with how the Brotherhood and its supporters have behaved so far in Tahrir Square. From its battle-scarred frontline skirmishers to suited politicians, the Brotherhood is downplaying its role in the Egyptian uprising and downplaying the role of any religious or class animus. “[Critics] say that this is a revolution of the poor against the rich,” called out a preacher during midday prayer services on Friday, Feb. 4. “They say this is a revolution of the hungry against the fed, of one sect against another. But it is not. It is a revolution for freedom that God ordained!” Finding a Brotherhood member who would brag about the group’s exploits in battle with the police was difficult. “This is a people’s revolution, and the Brotherhood is just a section of the people,” says one supporter. Officials were clear about giving the young activists who started the rebellion credit where it was due. “This is a youth movement led by the youth,” says one. “The Brotherhood is just a participant. I believe we are 5% to 10% of this, maximum.”

Moreover, Muslim Brotherhood leaders interviewed by TIME in Tahrir Square consistently spoke of their commitment to the civil, nonsectarian nature of the state. “The Muslim Brotherhood takes Islam as a template, but we don’t have a religious state or God-ordained rule,” says Ibrahim Zakaria, a Brotherhood official and former Member of Parliament. “We believe in democracy and all its rules. We believe in the principle that the people are the origin and source of sovereignty and that the people choose their leaders in free and secret ballots.”

On the subject of whether a new Egyptian government should cancel the Camp David Accords, they demurred. “We are not going to cancel any agreement previously made by the government,” says Zakaria. “But if there is a referendum about this or any other agreement, then we obey the people’s will.

But by and large, the democracy movement in Tahrir Square may be transforming the politics of the Brotherhood — and of Egypt — by exposing them to the breadth of opinion and identity freely in the public realm for the first time. Tahrir Square buzzes not just with chants against the government but also with conversations among Egyptians of all types, in which everyone is entitled to opinions that they can finally air. “It was the government that created false enemies, because it had no legitimacy,” says Mohammed Chalabi, an Arabic teacher. “When we are a free country, we won’t need any enemies.”

That very openness — if it continues despite a resurgence of Egypt’s security state in recent days — may in the end reduce the role of the Brotherhood as the country’s best-organized opposition once normal political parties are allowed to form. Anything can happen in a democracy.

“It’s unclear who the opposition even is at the moment,” says the Brotherhood’s Zakaria. “We can’t even define it. This is an illegal regime that made opposition illegal. So we are calling for free elections so we can find out just who the parties actually are.”

As all eyes in the Arab world are riveted by Egypt’s democracy uprising, activists in countries such as Jordan, Yemen and Syria have begun organizing protests against their own authoritarian regimes to demand reforms. Activists on Facebook pages such as “The Syrian Revolution” have called for a day of protests on Friday, with marches planned in front of the parliament in the capital city of Damascus — and at Syrian embassies around the world. But unlike Egypt, and even Yemen and Jordan, demonstrations in Syria are unlikely to pick up anywhere near enough momentum to seriously threaten the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The reason is simple: Syria, unlike Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, isn’t allied with the United States.

It’s not that anti-Americanism is a driving force behind these Arab demonstrations. On the contrary, the rage of the Egyptian protestors is directed at President Hosni Mubarak, with America and Israel barely rating a mention. But being friends with America opens Mubarak to a host of liabilities that the Syrian government doesn’t have.

For one thing, Syria doesn’t depend on billions of dollars in U.S. aid in the way that Egypt and Jordan do. The Assad regime, which has been a pariah country for years because of its support for various of the region’s militant groups, gets only sanctions from the U.S. government, and comparatively little international aid besides. Its currency isn’t traded on international markets. Its banking system is pretty closed. And its stock market is miniscule. Syria’s central bank has been stocking up hard currency for years for just such occasions, and Damascus doesn’t have the vast slums teeming with African-levels of poverty that Cairo has.

That means that unlike Egypt — which, out of deference to the domestic sensitivities of its U.S. patron, chose to do its dirty work against democracy protestors in Tahrir Square with plain-clothed thugs rather than use an army funded by American taxpayers — Syria has shown precious little concern for world opinion in meting out domestic repression. Being on the wrong side of the Bush Administration’s “democracy agenda” also helped the Syrian regime. While many Syrians resent the blatantly rigging of their country’s elections, stability-Syrian style was preferred by many to the chaotic democracy created next door by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Syria also has a few strategic cards — notably its support for Palestinian militants Hamas and Lebanese militants Hizballah — to play when necessary to divert attention from domestic discontent. And there’s the fact that the country is still officially at war with Israel, which occupies Syrian territory on the Golan Heights: That conflict is the grounds on which Damascus keeps its state of emergency laws in force.

But the advantages of being an anti-American Middle East authoritarian will begin to wear thin in the not-so-distant future, especially if the Obama Administration more firmly backs democracy in Egypt and pushes for similar changes in other U.S.-backed autocracies of the Arab world. Though its economic problems are less acute than Egypt’s, Syria also has a huge population of young people who want more opportunity than Syria’s closed economy can provide. And if the Middle East begins to have elected governments that deliver on the aspirations of their people, it will no longer be good enough for Syria just to be better than Iraq.

The Egyptian government denies that it had anything to do with orchestrating attacks against democracy protesters by crowds supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But during my attempt to reach the protests, it became clear not only that the police are doing nothing to stop groups of angry men from openly carrying weapons, but also that they are in command of them. Crossing the Nile at October 6th bridge to work my way into Tahrir from the north, I was grabbed by a young man who threatened me with a stick and tried to drag me over to what appeared to be an improvised gang checkpoint cutting off the tree-lined avenue that runs along the river. I turned to a nearby policemen for help, who merely told me “Go.”

More young men arrived, and they punched and frog-marched me to a wall where there were several others being held by the crowd, including a pair of Russian journalists, a Lebanese video crew, a kid who had been caught with anti-Mubarak signs, men with Islamic-style beards, and a poor Nigerian house cleaner who had left home without a passport and whom one raving brute in the crowd accused of being a drug dealer. “Mubarak good, the Egyptian system good!” he shouted at us, though it was hard to see from his decaying teeth, tattered clothes, and yellowed toenails that the Egyptian system had done him much good.

The presence of an Egyptian army tank crew kept and foot soldiers kept things from getting to rowdy. The Egyptian army officer corps appears to be siding with the government, calling on the democracy protesters to go home in the name in the name of stopping violence that the government itself created, and standing by as thugs have attacked the peaceful protests. But the foot soldiers near me seemed much more sympathetic to the demonstrations. On learning that I was American and might have inside information, one soldier asked me — eagerly it seemed — if the Mubarak regime was going to fall. But he refused my request to intervene.

The checkpoint turned out to be run by the police, with the deputized gang providing muscle. The crowd forced me to produce press ID which, which they turned over to uniformed cops. They in turn delivered my ID to a plainclothes Internal Security officer, who, with a leather trench coat and walkie-talkie looked like he had come straight from central casting. Eventually, he interrogated me and told me that the whole Tahrir Square area was forbidden. On his orders, the gang released me, and now, all smiles and backslapping, one walked me back over the bridge, swinging his club along the way.

Whether or not the government tactics will prove successfully ultimately remains to be seen. Beleagured Tahrir square protestors have complained of being cut off from medical attention, food and water. Many average Cairenes, while not necessarily sympathetic to the regime, are worried about a descent into chaos and economic collapse. The fact that the protests started at the beginning of the tourist season is a disaster to the 11% of the economy tied to foreign visitors who, after scenes of civil war played on televisions worldwide, will no doubt stay away for months. The mid-range downtown tourist hotel where I have been staying is otherwise completely empty, and its staff are praying the protests would end.

But there are still some 50,000 anti-government protestors in Tahrir Square, according to Wael Nawara, Secretary General of Al Gahd, an opposition party, who is there himself and blogging in English and Arabic at weeklite. He and other opposition leaders are calling for another day of protests after Friday Prayers tomorrow, but he doesn’t expect the regime to go quietly. “After what he have seen in the last few days, we don’t know what to expect. The government has tried everything from tear gas, to Molotov cocktails to terrorist squads. The government is willing to do anything. So we expect the worst.”

When popular demonstrations broke out on Jan. 25 against the U.S.-backed regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, more than 50,000 Americans were in Egypt, many of them visiting the pyramids during what is normally the beginning of the high tourist season. The U.S. government is now advising its citizens to stay in their hotels and away from the protests. An American government jet airliner, emblazoned with the seal of the U.S., sat on the tarmac of Cairo International Airport waiting to evacuate families of American diplomats when I arrived on Monday. The scene called to mind the Iranian revolution of 1979, when, after the fall of the Shah, another American-backed dictator, radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran. As if to prevent such a scenario in Egypt now, an American-designed Abrams Egyptian army tank stands guard at the entrance of the American embassy in downtown Cairo, which just happens to be a couple of blocks from the epicenter of the protests in Tahrir Square.

But this is not 1979. American flags aren’t being burned in the streets of Cairo. And it’s too bad more American college students on class trips stuck in Egypt haven’t attended the demonstrations. Not only are protesters unfailingly polite toward American visitors, but, by calling for an end to the Mubarak regime, Egypt’s popular uprising could actually be the beginning of a better friendship between the U.S. and Egypt.

Though the U.S.-brokered Camp David peace agreement of 1979 between Israel and Egypt is one of the foundations of American policy in the Middle East, the relationship between Egypt and America long ago became dysfunctional. In return for Egypt’s continuing support of U.S. efforts to safeguard the Jewish state, the U.S. gives Egypt billions of dollars in aid, and turns a blind eye to the Mubarak regime’s autocratic policies. But the regime’s despotic tactics and its pro-American policies have become more and more unpopular as Palestinian-Israeli peace — the ultimate promise of Camp David — never materialized. The U.S. has long worried that the inevitable breakup in Egypt would be ugly, and that Mubarak’s replacement might be the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition party, which has ties to the anti-Israeli Palestinian militant group Hamas.

But the fact that the Mubarak regime is being pushed aside by a broad-based people-power movement could be an opportunity for the U.S. to re-establish the relationship on a more sustainable basis. The Egyptian people have not risen up against their ruler to realign the country with the anti-American, anti-Israeli axis of Iran, Hamas, Syria and Hizballah in the cold war for the Middle East. Of the legion of signs and slogans arrayed and shouted in Tahrir Square, I encountered just one that even referred to Israel: a small Star of David on the necktie of a Mubarak dummy hung in effigy from a lamppost. For a political demonstration in the Arab world, this is next to nothing. One protester ran up to me and said, “I want the American people to know this is not about Israel. We are at peace with Israel. We are not at peace with Mubarak.”

In fact, Egyptians have taken to the streets because they want to be citizens of a normal, modern country that’s proud of itself and its place in the world, that chooses its leaders and its foreign policies, not a vassal state collecting handouts while its standard of living and moral values disappear. Which means that although a new government in Egypt would probably stop coordinating security policy with Israel, and would be more forceful in pursuing the Palestinian cause, it would not want war. “Camp David is a fact not just in Egypt but all the Middle East,” says Nagui El Ghatrifi, a former top Foreign Ministry official in the Egyptian government who became an opposition party leader in 2004, whom I met Tuesday after he finished praying with a large group of men at the demonstration in Tahrir Square. “Look at the Middle East. Only the most tyrannical regimes adhere to the old dealings with Israel. But that doesn’t mean that the Egyptian people are prepared to accept injustice in Palestine or at home.”

Continuing to look at events in Egypt only through the lens of foreign policy would be a big mistake. “If the U.S. realizes that there is a difference between an oppressed people and a people who managed to remove a tyrant, then it will remove many of the barriers between the two countries,” El Ghatrifi continues. “An Egypt without Mubarak will be more stable, more democratic and more peaceful in solving internal problems and dealing with its foreign policy.”