Epstein Secrets

e terrifying scale of Libya's Qaddafi and Syria's Assad nor stifled economic progress with such alacrity.

other bureaucracies, and thus had no legitimacy. Marcus Aurelius was one thing; Tunisia's Zine el- Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Syria's Bashar al- Assad, quite another. Certainly, the Arab Spring has proved much: that there is no otherness to Arab civilization, that Arabs yearn for universal values ju

he state together. To be sure, Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali neither ran police states on the terrifying scale of Libya's Qaddafi and Syria's Assad nor stifled economic progress with such alacrity. But while Mubarak and Ben Ali left their countries in conditions suitable for the emergence of stab

ns like the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Organization of American States, and to defend embattled allies like Syria's Bashar al-Assad. There is also growing replica- tion of what might be called authoritarian best practices, vividly on display in the new Chinese law on nongovernment

/analy- sis/20140405189054528-Dmitry-Kiselev-Western-behavior-borders-on-schizophrenia/. 8. Peter Pomerantsey, “Russia and the Menace of Unreality,” Atlantic, September 9, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/. 9. Editorial

Bush's support of Middle Eastern democracy and cultivate our relations with regional despots like Hosni Mubarak, the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace. Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the 'realists' would have

, or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's talk of "a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs," or my friend Jeffrey Goldberg's allusion in The Atlantic last year to a "consensus" that there is "a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July." That would be next month. I