Epstein Secrets

m Israel would induce the Iranian government to "gallop ahead" towards the bomb without any concern. The biggest reason why Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has agreed to talks during the last few years is not the EFTA_R1_02029843 EFTA02690076 14 fear of a military attack by Israel. The biggest reas

iddle East these dictators remain the exception to the rule, and this is why quasi monarchies of the iron-fisted Assad or the crazed and tyrannical Qaddafi are now under assault. THE PLACE where benevolent autocracy has struck deep and has systematic roots is Asia. Any discussion of whether and how de

required to hold the 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 t

of Israeli or U.S.-led strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities increasing, Assad's gradual descent to perdition risks impelling Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei to up the ante rather than stand down. And when this happens, the targeting of soft targets as happened in Burgas—such as the spate of brazen but

ominated regime has lost control over significant territory, its co-optation strategy so far has headed off the rapid internal atrophy that brought Qaddafi to his knees last October (although it has not stopped recent high- level defections). However, the Damascus blast that killed Assad's defense mini

scribe their actions not as concessions to the West but as "confidence-building" measures, aimed at demonstrating the seriousness of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's public pledge in February not to commit the "grave sin" of building a nuclear weapon. And the West would describe its easing of sanctions not as

rones, the way you went after terrorists was you sent your troops," says Goure. "You sent your Navy, you sent your Marines, like Reagan going after Qaddafi in the Eighties. You bombed their camp. Now you have drones that can be operated by the military or the CIA from thousands of miles away." The low