The Middle East has seen revolutionary unrest over the past couple of months.  Two long-standing dictators have been removed from power and more could be on the way. There will be two paramount factors that decide the fate of each protest: the military and the economic condition of each country involved.

Take Egypt for example. Why were tens of thousands of protestors allowed to walk the streets as they saw fit? Why were they able to get their message out? Why were foreign journalists allowed into the country? It’s because the military didn’t carry out former President Hosni Mubarak’s orders. They didn’t impose his curfew and left him virtually alone. At a certain point, he had no choice but to leave.

It should also be mentioned that Egypt was in a depressingly bad economic situation. Like many nations in the region, Egypt has a comparatively large  young population, and those people need jobs. Mubarak wasn’t much help, and the common plight of the people was essential to uniting them against him.

However, not every country is like that. Take Bahrain for example. A vast Shiite majority has been protesting for days against what they describe as ethnic discrimination and repression. While these people have certainly made their mark, they’ve by no means cracked the Bahraini monarchy.

This is because the military— which is made primarily of Sunnis because they’re the only ones who are hired for the security forces — is loyal to the king and carries out his orders. Bahrain is also a somewhat wealthy nation compared to most in the Middle East because of the revenue brought in by the Persian Gulf.

It would be hard to bring everyone together against the king. That is not to mention that the Saudi royal family would blow a gasket if they had a Shiite-dominated neighbor — especially with Iran becoming so powerful.

Now for the ugly, and it’s not just Colonel Qaddafi’s face. In the case of Libya, there is almost no organized military. Qaddafi, who took power in a military coup in 1969, wanted to all but guarantee that the same thing wouldn’t happen to him. He divided the military into different militias, which he handed off to his various favorites. Libya also doesn’t have the best economic standing in the world, but they get a great deal of revenue from the oil that European nations purchase. The reason that the Libyan rebellion has grown so quickly is because, unlike in Bahrain, there isn’t a huge part of the country that has ethnic loyalty to Qaddafi. He certainly has tribal supporters, but the ethnic divide is nowhere near as clear cut as in Bahrain.

There are also more tribes in Libya, meaning that not as many people feel compelled to be on the pro-government side. Plus the poor economic condition of the Libyan people, as well as Qaddafi’s bad human rights record, have united them against him, and even the “military” —or lack of a better word — is divided between them and him.

So what does this all mean? This means that one can’t pull a successful rebellion out of his or her hat. There needs to be a certain degree of impoverishment and abuse felt by enough people so that they would risk anything up to death to remove their dictator from power. There’s also something that you can’t win a political revolution without: guns. As we’ve seen in Egypt, the protestors don’t need the guns themselves, but they need the people with the guns on their side. Notice that Egypt’s dictator has fallen, and Qaddafi’s on the way. However, it looks like the Bahraini monarchy is here to stay.