DETROIT       

I’m barreling along a rural Michigan highway at 75 miles per hour in a gray Ford Taurus X when I glance down to check a number on a screen.       

It can’t be more than two seconds, but when I look back up, I’m inches from plowing into a huge green truck. Panicked, I slam on the brakes.

Even though I’m in Virttex, the Ford simulator that uses virtual reality to give you the eerily real sensation that you’re flying down the highway past cars and barns, I still feel shaken.       

I made the mistake of taking my eyes off the road for more than 1.5 seconds, which is the danger zone, according to technology experts at Ford headquarters.       

Ford, Chrysler, Chevy and other car companies are betting on the proposition that, as long as your eyes don’t stray from the road for more than a moment, your other senses can enjoy a cornucopia of diversions on your dashboard.       

I worried in a prior column  that Ford cars with the elaborate and popular new “in-car connectivity” sounded like death traps. Ford Sync lets you sync up to apps, reading your Twitter feeds to you. MyFord Touch plays your iPod on demand and reads your texts to you — including emoticons — and allows you to choose one of 10 prewritten responses (“I’m on my way,” “I’m outside,” “O.K.”). It also has voice-activated 3-D navigation that allows you to merely announce “I’m hungry” or “Find Chinese restaurant.”       

Your car can even help you with a bad mood by giving you ambient lighting, vibrating your seat or heating your steering wheel.       

Ford executives invited me to Detroit to experience their snazzy new technology firsthand.       

They are on the cusp of a system featuring the futuristic avatar Eva, the vaguely creepy face and voice of a woman on your dashboard who can read you your e-mail, update your schedule, recite articles from newspapers, guide you to the restaurant where you’re having lunch and recommend a selection from your iPod. Ford’s working on a Web browser, which would be locked while driving.       

Remember when your car used to be a haven of peace from the world? Now it’s just a bigger, noisier and much more dangerously distracting smartphone.       

Over lunch at Ford, Sue Cischke, a dynamic company executive, argued that even before cellphones and iPods, drivers were in danger of distraction from reaching for a briefcase or shooing away a bee.       

“Telling younger people not to use a cellphone is almost like saying, ‘Don’t breathe,’ ” she said.       

Given that Americans are addicted to Web access and tech toys, she said, it will never work to simply ban them. “So we’ve got to figure out how we make people safer,” she said, “and the more people can just talk to their car like they’re talking to a passenger, the more useful it would be.”       

Given that, however, we’re talking about human beings who live in an A.D.D. world, wouldn’t it be safer to try to curb the addiction, rather than indulging it? Nobody thought you could get young people to pay for music after downloading it for free, either, but they do.       

David Teater, a former market research consultant to auto manufacturers, lost his 12-year-old son in a distracted driving accident in Grand Rapids, Mich.,  seven years ago. A 20-year-old nanny driving her charge in her employer’s Hummer was so immersed in a cellphone call that she ran a red light and smashed into Teater’s wife’s Chevy Suburban. Now he works at the National Safety Council.       

He says he doesn’t expect car companies —  which are trying to make cars more seductive —  to be arbiters of safety. “They  were slow to move toward seat belts and airbags until we, the customer, said we want it,” he said. He sees the overwrought dashboards as trouble.  “We can chew gum and walk, but we can’t do two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously.”       

Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation, is livid about the dashboard bells and whistles.  When he saw a Ford ad with a bubbly young woman named Kelly using the new souped-up system to gab on the phone hands-free and not paying attention to the road, he called Alan Mulally, the president and C.E.O of Ford.       

“I said to him, ‘That girl looks so distracted, it belies belief that this is what you want in terms of safety,’ ” LaHood  told me. “Putting entertainment centers in automobiles does not contribute to safe driving. When you’re trying to update your Facebook or put out a tweet, it’s a distraction.”       

He said he would compile his own statistics, meet with car executives and use the bully pulpit. “We’ll see what the auto companies can do voluntarily and what we need to do otherwise,” he said. “I don’t think drivers should be doing any of that.”  

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved     

MOSCOW — Let the Middle East and North Africa be buffeted by populist discontent over repressive governments. Here in Lenin’s former territory, across the expanse of the old Soviet Union, rulers with iron fists still have the upper hand.       

Their endurance serves as a sobering counterpoint for anyone presuming that the overthrow of a tyrannical regime by a broad-based movement is inevitably followed by vibrant democracy.       

The long-serving president of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, for example, won another term in December with 80 percent of the vote, then took great offense when the results were called shamefully implausible by his opponents. (They have not been heard from since.)       

Over in, the even longer-serving president has had himself coroneted with the formal title of “national leader.”       

The strongest of the post-Soviet strongmen, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is actually a comparative newcomer, having reigned unchallenged for a mere decade now.       

Nearly two decades ago, the collapse of Soviet Communism offered the promise that power would soon be wielded differently in this region: The newly independent former Soviet republics, sprung from the shackles of totalitarianism, would embrace free elections, multiple political parties and a vigorously independent media.       

But those hopes now seem premature, or perhaps naïve. In the 1990’s, the Soviet breakup sowed chaos — most notably in Russia — and a corps of autocrats arose in response, pledging stability and economic growth. The brand of democracy that is advanced in the West emerged discredited in many of these countries.       

And so even as upheavals in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world have garnered attention across the former Soviet Union, the region’s leaders express confidence that they are not under threat.       

“In the past, such a scenario was harbored for us, and now attempts to implement it are even more likely,” Mr. Putin’s protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, warned last week. “But such a scenario is not going to happen.”       

The wilting of the democracy movement was reflected in the arrest of several Russian opposition leaders at a small rally in Moscow on Dec. 31  —  one of the regular protests scheduled to highlight the 31st article of Russia’s Constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly.       

There was no public outcry over the arrests, and people went about with their lives. Tunisia, it was not.       

The same opposition politicians, now out of jail, returned on Jan. 31, hoping that an inspiring new example — Egypt — would prove galvanizing, and Triumphal Square in Moscow would have the feel of Tahrir Square in Cairo.       

“We are all watching what is happening in Egypt,” Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, told the crowd.       

“They have had 30 years of the dictator Mubarak, who is a thief and corrupt,” he said. “How is he really any different than our guy?”       

People shouted, “Russia without Putin!” But once again, society did not join in. It did not appear that more than 1,000 people attended.       

What’s more, many were not particularly young. That helps to explain why such uprisings seem to have had a harder time taking root. Populations in Russia and many other former Soviet republics are aging, in contrast to those in the Middle East. Here, there are fewer people to carry out youthful acts of rebellion, whether on the streets or on Facebook and Twitter.       

The older generation grew up under Soviet rule, which was so tightly controlled that today’s autocracies feel like an improvement. They also enjoy more economic freedom today.       

Even in the six former Soviet republics that have Muslim majorities, the events in the Middle East have not had significant repercussions.       

If anything, the violence has strengthened the hand of the autocrats in the short term because it has caused oil prices to spike, benefiting the economies of petro-states like Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.       

The current crop of post-Soviet leaders has also skillfully played upon fears of instability and misery in the wake of the 1990’s, knowing that when times are tough, people often prefer authoritarian order to cacophonous democracy.       

A talk show on the Echo of Moscow radio station, which is something akin to the NPR of Russia, chewed over the question of why protesters had flooded the streets of Middle Eastern capitals and not Moscow. “Our people endure, and will patiently endure, suffering,” said Georgi Mirsky, a well-known political analyst. “Because Soviet Man is still alive — that’s the thing! The mentality of the people (or at least a considerable number of them) has not changed enough for them to develop a taste for freedom.”       

There are, of course, exceptions. The Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have joined the European Union and embraced Western mores. But they were always outliers within the Soviet Union, and only became part of it when Stalin seized them during World War II.       

Even the so-called color revolutions over the last decade in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, which were widely viewed as a repudiation of authoritarianism, have since fallen flat.       

In Ukraine, a new president was elected last year after a backlash against the Orange Revolution, and he is pursuing a Putin-style crackdown on the opposition.       

A revolt in Kyrgyzstan last year ousted a ruler who had ousted a predecessor. As a result, politicians in Kyrgyzstan’s neighbors in Central Asia now maintain that they need heavily centralized rule to avoid Kyrgyzstan’s fate.       

“We have to feed our people, then we can create conditions where our people can become involved in politics,” said Nurlan Uteshev, a Kazakh from his country’s ruling party.       

Mr. Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former (and perhaps future) president, regularly cites the example of neighboring Ukraine. “We must not in any way allow the Ukrainization of political life in Russia,” Mr. Putin once warned.       

For a time, Georgia seemed at the forefront of a democratic wave. But in 2007, President Mikheil Saakashvili, a close American ally, violently suppressed his opposition. Now, his rivals characterize him as no better than Mr. Putin.       

Mr. Saakashvili’s supporters defend him by contending that he will not try to stay in power when his term expires in 2013. They say he has made enormous strides in modernizing Georgia, adding that it is unrealistic to expect a country long immersed in the Soviet system to be transformed overnight.       

That is a common refrain. Janez Lenarcic, a diplomat who heads democracy promotion for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has the taxing job of trying to persuade these countries to loosen the reins.       

“The notion of stability plays an important role here,” Mr. Lenarcic said. “They say, ‘We need more time, we need to get there at our own pace.’ We respond that long-term stability will come only with strong democratic institutions, not with personalities, because personalities are not around forever.”       

He said he remained optimistic, despite the stagnation. And perhaps views are evolving. A recent poll of Russians asked if they preferred order (even at the expense of their rights) or democracy (even if it gives rise to destructive elements). Order won, 56 percent to 23 percent.       

That may not sound encouraging, but a decade ago the spread was 81 percent to 9 percent.  

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.     

So much for Angelo Mozilo taking the fall for the financial crisis.       

Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers.       

In its article about the Justice Department’s decision, The Los Angeles Times said prosecutors had concluded that Mr. Mozilo’s actions “did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.”       

Just months earlier, the Justice Department concluded that Joe Cassano shouldn’t take the fall for the financial crisis either. Mr. Cassano, you’ll recall, is the former head of the financial products unit of the American International Group, a man whose enthusiasm for credit-default swaps led, pretty directly, to the need for a huge government bailout of A.I.G. There was a time when it appeared that there was no way the government would let Mr. Cassano walk. But it did.       

And then there’s Richard Fuld, the man who presided over Lehman Brothers’ demise. Though he was the subject of an investigation shortly after the Lehman bankruptcy, it appears that prosecutors are moving on.       

Most of the other Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks — risks that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees — aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen. Nor has there been a single indictment against any top executive at a subprime lender.       

The only two people on Wall Street to have been prosecuted for their roles in the crisis are a pair of minor Bear Stearns executives, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, whose internal hedge fund, stuffed with triple-A mortgage-backed paper, collapsed in the summer of 2007, an event that anticipated the crisis. A jury acquitted them.       

Two and a half years after the world’s financial system nearly collapsed, you’re entitled to wonder whether any of the highly paid executives who helped kindle the disaster will ever see jail time — like Michael Milken  in the 1980s, or Jeffrey Skilling after the Enron disaster. Increasingly, the answer appears to be no. The harder question, though, is whether anybody should.       

•       

Aficionados of financial crises like to point to the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s as perhaps the high-water mark in prosecuting executives after a broad financial scandal. When the government loosened the rules for owning a thrift, the industry was taken over by aggressive entrepreneurs, far too many of whom made self-dealing loans using savings-and-loan deposits as their own personal piggy banks.       

In time, nearly 1,000 savings and loans — a third of the industry — collapsed, costing the government billions. According to William K. Black, a former regulator who teaches law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, “There were over 1,000 felony convictions in major cases” involving executives of the thrifts. Solomon L. Wisenberg, a lawyer who writes for a blog on white collar crime, said, “The prosecutions were hugely successful.”       

That is partly because the federal government threw enormous resources at those investigations. There were a dozen or more Justice Department task forces. Over 1,000 F.B.I. agents were involved. The government attitude was that it would do whatever it took to bring crooked bank executives to justice.       

The executives howled that they were being unfairly persecuted, but the cases against them were often rooted in a simple concept: theft. And as prosecutors racked up victories in court, they became confident in their trial approach, and didn’t back away from taking on even the most well-connected thrift executives, like Charles Keating, who owned Lincoln Savings — and who eventually went to prison.       

Today, Mr. Black says, the government doesn’t have nearly as many resources to pursue such cases. With the F.B.I. understandably focused on terrorism, there isn’t a lot of manpower left to dig into potential crimes that may have taken place during the financial crisis. Fewer than 150 of the bureau’s agents are assigned to mortgage fraud, for instance. Several lawyers who represent white collar defendants told me that outside of New York, there aren’t nearly enough prosecutors who understand the intricacies of financial crime and know how to prosecute it. It is a lot easier to prosecute people for old-fashioned crimes — robbery, assault, murder — than for financial crimes.       

Which leads to another point: as Sheldon T. Zenner, a white collar criminal lawyer in Chicago, puts it, “These kinds of cases are extraordinarily difficult to make. They require lots of time and resources. You have some of the best, highest-paid and most sophisticated lawyers on the other side fighting you at every turn. You are climbing a really high mountain when you try to do one of these cases.”       

Take, again, the one big case that prosecutors have brought, against Mr. Cioffi and Mr. Tannin.  The Bear Stearns executives had written numerous e-mails expressing their fears and anxieties as the fund began to sink. Prosecutors viewed those e-mails as smoking guns, proof that the men had withheld important information from their investors. Thanks largely to those e-mails, prosecutors saw the case as a slam dunk.       

But it wasn’t. For every e-mail the executives wrote predicting the worst, they would write another expressing their belief that everything would be O.K. Besides, expressing such fears publicly would have doomed the fund, because liquidity would have instantly vanished. Instead of viewing Mr. Cioffi and Mr. Tannin as crooks, the jury saw them as two men struggling to make the best of a difficult situation. By the time the trial was over, the e-mails, in their totality, made the defendants seem sympathetic rather than criminal.       

It seems safe to say that the government’s failure to convict those two Bear Stearns executives has caused prosecutors to shy away from bringing other cases. After all, the case against Mr. Cioffi and Mr. Tannin was supposed to be the easy one. By contrast, a case against Angelo Mozilo would have been, from the start, a much harder one to win.       

Although the Justice Department never filed charges against Mr. Mozilo, one can assume that its case would have been similar to the civil case brought earlier by the Securities and Exchange Commission. (On the eve of the trial date last fall, the S.E.C. blinked and settled with Mr. Mozilo.) One of the S.E.C.’s charges was insider trading — that Mr. Mozilo sold nearly $140 million worth of stock after he knew the company was in trouble. But the defense countered by pointing out that Mr. Mozilo was selling his stock under an automatic selling program that top corporate executives often use — thus mooting the insider trading accusation.       

Like the Bear Stearns executives, Mr. Mozilo had written his share of e-mails expressing worries about some of Countrywide’s loan practices. He called one of Countrywide’s subprime products “the most dangerous product in existence, and there can be nothing more toxic.” The government argued that Mr. Mozilo had a legal obligation to share that information with investors.       

But this case, too, would have been awfully difficult to make. Countrywide’s descent into subprime madness was hardly a secret. It made all sorts of crazy  adjustable rate mortgages that required no documentation of income; its array of products was also well known and disclosed to investors. Indeed, Mr. Mozilo was quite vocal and public in saying that the housing market was due to fall, and fall hard. But he always assumed that whatever its losses, Countrywide was so strong that it would be one of the survivors and would feast on the carcasses of its former competitors. No internal e-mail he wrote contradicted that belief.       

Was there outright fraud at Countrywide? Of course there was. That is a large part of the reason that Bank of America, which bought Countrywide in early 2008, has struggled so mightily with the legacy of all the Countrywide loans now on its books. But most of the fraudulent actions at Countrywide took place at the bottom of the food chain, at the mortgage origination level. It has been well-documented that mortgage brokers induced borrowers to take loans that they never understood, and often persuaded them to lie on their loan applications.       

That kind of predatory lending is against the law — and it should be prosecuted. But going after small-time mortgage brokers isn’t nearly as satisfying as putting the big guy in jail, especially a big guy like Mr. Mozilo, who symbolizes to many Americans the excesses and wrongdoing embodied in the subprime lending mess. The problem is that Mr. Mozilo, though he helped create the culture that made such predatory lending acceptable, never made the fraudulent loans himself. Legally, if not morally, he’s off the hook.       

A few days ago, I listened to a recording of a lengthy interview with Mr. Mozilo conducted by investigators working for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and posted recently on the commission’s Web site. It was a remarkable performance; Mr. Mozilo expressed no regrets and no remorse. He extolled subprime loans as a way to allow lower-income Americans to get a piece of the American dream and “really build wealth” — just like people used to do during the housing bubble. He bragged that Countrywide, unlike the too-big-to-fail banks, never took a penny of government money. He said that Countrywide had helped put 25 million Americans in homes.       

His voice rising passionately, he said finally, “Countrywide was one of the greatest companies in the history of this country.”       

Which is a final reason Mr. Mozilo would have been difficult to prosecute. Delusion is an iron-clad defense.     

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved  

Whether by plane or bus, ferry or foot, tens of thousands of foreign citizens — including hundreds of Americans  — were scrambling to find a way out of Libya on Wednesday as forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fought  to maintain control of a shrinking portion of the oil-rich country.       

Turkey appeared to have had the most success in spiriting its people out of the country, packing more than 5,000  onto ferries and planes that left over the last several days.       

The United States, after being turned down for permission to land a chartered plane in Tripoli, sent a ferry Wednesday that was expected to transport about 600 people, mostly Americans, to Malta. The ferry arrived in Tripoli Wednesday, the State Department said, but its departure was delayed by high seas.       

The State Department has said several thousand United States citizens, most of them holding dual citizenship, were in Libya when the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi began.       

As wealthier nations rushed to coordinate rescues, migrant workers from poorer nations in Asia and Africa — the majority of the work force there, according to an immigration expert — were fending for themselves, with their home countries unable to organize evacuations. Many crossed the borders into Tunisia and Egypt by foot or in buses  piled high with luggage.       

Those fleeing the country, as well as those who had not yet found a way out, described scenes of chaos and deprivation. Protesters claimed that the opposition was taking control of cities close to the capital, Tripoli, where Colonel Qaddafi has mobilized mercenaries and militiamen to defend his stronghold.       

One worker, Suang Upara from Thailand, reported that Libyans had burglarized the place where he had been living with other migrants.       

“They used knives to threaten us and stole everything from us,” Mr. Upara, 29, said in a phone interview from Benghazi, where more than 200 people were reported to have been killed in a government crackdown.       

He said that he was subsisting on one small loaf of bread each day and dirty water filtered through tissue paper.       

Chinese reports said that a site run by a Chinese construction company in eastern Libya had been attacked by armed looters who forced nearly 1,000 workers out of their dormitories.       

The daunting nature of the evacuation led several nations to turn to others for help. Turkey, which  said it had mounted its largest evacuation effort ever, said 21 countries including Russia and the United States had asked for assistance in helping their citizens to leave. Officials in Ankara said that a 27-year-old Turkish worker had been killed in Tripoli, but they gave no details.       

Israel, meanwhile, agreed to allow about 300 Palestinians into the West Bank even though they did not have residency documents for the territory. While the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, welcomed Israel’s offer, he had asked for thousands to be allowed entry, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.       

The International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, estimates that as many as 1.5 million migrants were working in Libya at the start of the strife, which appears to have led to the deaths of hundreds of Libyans. Many of the migrants came to work in the country’s construction industry, which had been booming, and in its rich oil fields.       

The huge numbers of people forced to flee quickly were exacerbating fears in Europe that countries like Italy would be flooded with needy people, leading Italy’s foreign minister to refer to a possible “biblical exodus.”       

Although Turkey had rescued thousands of its citizens by Wednesday, about 25,000 were still stranded. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that Turkey would keep ferries running nonstop and was expecting at least some to carry medical and food supplies for Libyan civilians.       

With civilian flights overwhelmed by the numbers of people trying to leave, governments from around the world were trying to send ships and chartered aircraft.       

Two Italian naval vessels headed to eastern Libyan ports to rescue citizens from Benghazi and other cities where airports were damaged.       

The Chinese government moved to evacuate about 2,900 of its estimated 30,000 workers from Libya, the Xinhua news agency reported. And the Foreign Ministry of Jordan said that a Royal Jordanian plane carrying 285 citizens was expected to arrive from Libya and that another 90 crossed safely by land into Egypt on Wednesday.       

Jean-Philippe Chauzy, chief spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said that many migrants from poorer nations were “bunkering down for the moment.”       

“Over the past 18 hours,” he said Wednesday, there were “only four nationals from Guinea who have made it to Tunisia.”       

“That’s certainly not representative of the sub-Saharan Africans employed in Libya,” he said. “It’s a trickle.”       

On Wednesday, Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, warned lawmakers that as many as 300,000 migrant workers in Libya could seek refuge in Europe, with many ending up in nearby countries, including Italy and Greece.       

“We are not asking Europe to distribute the immigrants across its territory, but we are asking for a serious mechanism on how to split the economic and social burden of an immigration wave,” he said. “Europe needs to assume its duties.”       

But Mr. Chauzy said those sorts of warnings were premature. For those who cannot flee by air or sea, the major points of exit will continue to be Egypt and Tunisia, he said.       

As migrants poured across both borders, Mr. Chauzy said there were reports that African workers desperate to leave but lacking money were trying to reach Libya’s southern border with Niger — a desert trek of more than 1,000 miles.       

“It’s pretty awful,” he said, “even in the best of times.”       

MANAMA, Bahrain — The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.       

While it is far too soon to write the final chapter on the uprisings’ impact, Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said. This week Iran sent two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since its revolution in 1979, and Egypt’s new military leaders allowed them to pass.       

Saudi Arabia, an American ally and a Sunni nation that jousts with Shiite Iran for regional influence, has been shaken. King Abdullah on Wednesday signaled his concern by announcing a $10 billion increase in welfare spending to help young people marry, buy homes and open businesses, a gesture seen as trying to head off the kind of unrest that fueled protests around the region.       

King Abdullah then met with the king of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, to discuss ways to contain the political uprising by the Shiite majority there. The Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain accuse their Shiite populations of loyalty to Iran, a charge rejected by Shiites who say it is intended to stoke sectarian tensions and justify opposition to democracy.       

The uprisings are driven by domestic concerns. But they have already shredded a regional paradigm in which a trio of states aligned with the West supported engaging Israel and containing Israel’s enemies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, experts said. The pro-engagement camp of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia is now in tatters. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has been forced to resign, King Abdullah of Jordan is struggling to control discontent in his kingdom and Saudi Arabia has been left alone to face a rising challenge to its regional role.       

“I think the Saudis are worried that they’re encircled — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon; Yemen is unstable; Bahrain is very uncertain,” said Alireza Nader, an expert in international affairs with the RAND Corporation. “They worry that the region is ripe for Iranian exploitation. Iran has shown that it is very capable of taking advantage of regional instability.”       

“Iran is the big winner here,” said a regional adviser to the United States government who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.       

Iran’s circumstances could change, experts cautioned, if it overplayed its hand or if popular Arab movements came to resent Iranian interference in the region. And it is by no means assured that pro-Iranian groups would dominate politics in Egypt, Tunisia or elsewhere.       

For now, Iran and Syria are emboldened. Qatar and Oman are tilting toward Iran, and Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen are in play.       

“If these ‘pro-American’ Arab political orders currently being challenged by significant protest movements become at all more representative of their populations, they will for sure become less enthusiastic about strategic cooperation with the United States,” Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, former National Security Council staff members, wrote in an e-mail.       

They added that at the moment, Iran’s leaders saw that “the regional balance is shifting, in potentially decisive ways, against their American adversary and in favor of the Islamic Republic.” Iran’s standing is stronger in spite of its challenges at home, with a troubled economy, high unemployment and a determined political opposition.       

The United States may also face challenges in pressing its case against Iran’s nuclear programs, some experts asserted.       

“Recent events have also taken the focus away from Iran’s nuclear program and may make regional and international consensus on sanctions even harder to achieve,” Mr. Nader said. Iran’s growing confidence is based on a gradual realignment that began with the aftershocks of the Sept. 11 attacks. By ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the United States removed two of Iran’s regional enemies who worked to contain its ambitions. Today, Iran is a major player in both nations, an unintended consequence.       

Iran demonstrated its emboldened attitude  this year in Lebanon when its ally, Hezbollah, forced the collapse of the pro-Western government of Saad Hariri. Mr. Hariri was replaced with a prime minister backed by Hezbollah, a bold move that analysts say was undertaken with Iran’s support.       

“Iraq and Lebanon are now in Iran’s sphere of influence with groups that have been supported by the hard-liners for decades,” said Muhammad Sahimi, an Iran expert in Los Angeles who frequently writes about Iranian politics. “Iran is a major player in Afghanistan. Any regime that eventually emerges in Egypt will not be as hostile to Hamas as Mubarak was, and Hamas has been supported by Iran. That may help Iran to increase its influence there even more.”       

Iran could also benefit from the growing assertiveness of Shiites in general. Shiism is hardly monolithic, and Iran does not speak on behalf of all Shiites. But members of that sect are linked by faith and by their strong sense that they have been victims of discrimination by the Sunni majority. Events in Bahrain illustrate that connection well.       

Bahrain has about 500,000 citizens, 70 percent of them Shiite. The nation has been ruled by a Sunni family since it was captured from the Persians in the 18th century. The Shiites have long argued that they are discriminated against in work, education and politics. Last week, they began a public uprising calling for democracy, which would bring them power. The government at first used lethal force to try to stop the opposition, killing seven. It is now calling for a dialogue while the protesters, turning out in huge numbers, are demanding the government’s resignation.       

But demonstrators have maintained  their loyalty to Bahrain. The head of the largest Shiite party, Al Wefaq, said that the party rejected Iran’s type of Islamic government. On Tuesday, a leading member of the party, Khalil Ebrahim al-Marzooq, said he was afraid that the king was trying to transform the political dispute into a sectarian one. He said there were rumors the king would open the border with Saudi Arabia and let Sunni extremists into the country to attack the demonstrators.       

“The moment that any border opens by the government, means the other borders will open,” he said. “You don’t expect people will see their similar sect being killed and not interfere. We will not call them.”       

But, he said, they will come.