Epstein Secrets

Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had fallen a month earlier. From Cairo, the awakening became a pan-Arab affair, catching fire in Yemen and Bahrain. As a monarchy, the latter was a rare exception, since in this season it was chiefly the republics of strongmen that were seized with unrest. But w

led its affairs with relative ease. It elected a constituent assembly in which al Nanda, an Islamist party, secured a plurality. Al Nanda's leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, was a shrewd man; years in exile had taught him caution, and his party formed a coalition government with two secular partners. In Libya, foreign

ond only to the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Salafis are a growing influence in £yria's rebellion. And they have parties or factions in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Yemen and among Palestinians. Salafis are only one slice of a rapidly evolving Islamist spectrum. The variety of Islamists in the

all want to many you." Marriage may have been a euphemism. Other more modern Islamists fear the Salafi factor. "The Salafis try to push us," said Rachid al-Ghannouchi, founder of Ennanda, the ruling Islamist party in Tunisia. The two Islamist groups there are now rivals. "Salafis are against drafting a constituti

al leaders to choose the same system as the ten post- communist countries that have been admitted to the European Union: parliamentarianism. Finally, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who leads the largest Islamic- inspired political party, Al Nahda, went out of his way to tell me that he has signed an agreement with some secular

nse often seemed like a giant game of whack-a-mole, with a new problem popping up daily, was inevitable. And so was the variety of U.S. responses. In Bahrain, where the United States had established the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, and in Yemen, where counterterrorism is king, interests trump