Epstein Secrets

ecurity should be paramount. We believe that, had that been put in place, we would not have faced the two disasters in Iraq — the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Iraq war that began with the U.S. invasion in 2003. One disaster, the Iraq-Iran war, was enough. So we believe that confidence-building mea

There are disagreements in the party on what decisions to make and compromises to give. In the party congress, I wasn't elected by 99 percent, like Ben Ali. Seventy percent voted for me. Maybe this 70 percent has gone down a bit because of the compromises we had to give, but I think the majority of the

ith the Syrian leader having received messages of support over the past 48 hours from the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Qatar, the emir of Kuwait, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even the United States sees Assad in a different light to other leaders in the Arab world, with

le happy. Unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, Syrians see Assad as part of the solution in their country, and not, like Hosni Mubarak and Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, as part of the problem. He is young, closer to their age than both presidents had been to young Egyptians and Tunisians, and has not been around f

he big worry is that spreading unrest will culminate in another shock akin to the oil embargo of 1973, the Iranian revolution or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Oil is more global than it was during those previous crises. In the 1970s production was concentrated around the Persian Gulf. Since then a gushe

nt was authoritarian but also determinedly secular and pro- Western. The cracks, however, were larger than anyone thought: President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had carefully hidden the extent to which illness had weakened his control of the government; his ties with other centers of power, such as the mili

thousands times, boiled over in a month of demonstrations against Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. To the amazement of the Arab world, Mr. Ben Ali fled the country when the military declined to back him by brutally putting down the demonstrations. Spurred on by televised images and YouTube vide

for them," says Jasim Husain, a senior member of the Wefaq Shiite opposition party in Bahrain. Since March 14, the regional cold war has escalated. Kuwait expelled several Iranian diplomats after it discovered and dismantled, it says, an Iranian spy cell that was casing critical infrastructure and U.S.