Epstein Secrets

imitations, its borderless online conversations are offsetting the region's political, religious, social, and cultural balkanization. The people of West Asia and North Africa are talking among themselves, even if their governments remain remote. That is a source of hope, if not yet of the systematic and

rting a pell-mell civil war. President Obama is embracing the logic of a political settlement for Afghanistan with his speech Wednesday night. With Osama bin Laden dead, Obama can claim that America's core mission of combating al-Qaeda is succeeding. He can bring some troops home and step up diplomatic negotia

argument, and plunge instead into a pluralistic discourse that will engage whole populations. SHI'ITE ABSOLUTISM, SUNNI ROYALTY Some societies of West Asia ("Middle East"), nevertheless, are markedly averse to concepts of civil society, most notably Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran, of course, projects Pers

pectives from Egypt before and after Mubarak," talk prepared for Philadelphia, 2 May 2011 (but not formally given, displaced by news of the death of Osama bin Laden), p. 2. [11] Christopher Alexander, "Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Tunisia," Middle East Report, October-December, 1997. [12] My outlook h

ans themselves. But here again, the goal was to make Iran's `enemies' uncomfortable, not to destabilise its neighbour.° 62 As it is better known in West Asia, with Hezbollah. See for example Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah. A Short Story. Princeton University Press, 2007, pp.72 and 110. 63 Mir H Sadat

Qaeda's own vision of the Iranian neighbour. Al Qaeda opposed any official relations with Tehran, an 'enemy' to be opposed all the time. The goal of Osama bin Laden's organisation was to have its own routes out of Afghanistan, independent of the Iranian authorities' influence.40 At the end of 1990s, Tehran had mo