Epstein Secrets

can see that Alawite leadership will not leave power without a long and bloody fight. Recreating a sphere of Turkish-modeled Sunni influence in the Levant may be a long-term goal for Ankara, but the Turkish government is certainly not prepared to pay the near-term cost of civil strife in Syria spillin

nd Syria. In both cases, the insurgents are seen in the West as the "good guys," battling corrupt, autocratic leaders. Personally, I wish that both Moammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad would give up power tomorrow. But that doesn't seem in the cards: Both leaders have shown they're willing to kill thousands of

however important they are on the theoretical level, but rather the territorial integrity and sovereignty of these two pillars of stability in the Levant and the Gulf region. One of the major differences in the positions of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in this respect is how to perceive and deal with Iran

f international terrorism. In response, the U.S.-sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much-has gone to war or at least gone after the likes of Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Kim II- sung, and the Taliban. Like it or not, only the United St

ia, ISIS would not be on the rampage. A plague on both their houses! It's unseemly to fight Washington's talk-show wars over the myriad dead of the Levant. The facts are plain enough. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 because of its weapons of mass destruction program. However Iraq did not have a

m behind," was justified by "R2P" — the "o_sponsibility protect" Libyans, especially in Benghazi, from the supposed threat of genocide inflicted by Moammar Gaddafi. This humanitarian imperialism quickly became an exercise in regime change. But the prolonged attempt to assassinate Gaddafi from the air made no p