Epstein Secrets

staff Sami Anan; and the heads of Egypt's army, navy and air force — as finally giving Egypt's revolution the chance to remove key remnants of the Mubarak regime and fulfill its promise. Others, particularly non-Islamists, are more prone to see recent actions as the Muslim Brotherhood removing any che

d Abbas. Early hopes that Egypt's new president, Muhammad Morsi, might put the Hamas genie back in its bottle have subsided. Under his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, donors meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in March 2009 committed $5 billion to repair damage from Israel's Gaza war in 2006 and promised to end the siege

rrence as an affordable means of guaranteeing national sovereignty and preventing major conflict between the U.S. and potential adversaries in the Asia-Pacific. While earlier defense planning and acquisition were based on economic conditions that no longer exist, Congress's options to balance the budget by

or flow, would dissent be further tolerated or not on popular and official levels and would Egypt's security apparatuses decidedly return to their Hosni Mubarak-era ways? Would the upcoming electoral processes and political environment be substantially competitive, inclusive and representative? What will be the

, army chief Gen. Abdul-Fattah al-Sissi would become president with the traditional 90 percent vote claimed by dictators from Gamal Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak. Moussa, a former apparatchik of the Nasserist regime, is already peddling that scenario. "Gen. al-Sissi is the best man for Egypt right now," he

well as in the Iran nuclear talks and the Israeli-Palestinian saga. The US also remains the main guarantor of the security arrangements of Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. And yet, America under President Obama is clearly more reluctant actually to use its military muscle. When Congress debated m

andil to Gaza was no more politically valuable than those conducted by the late Omar Suleiman, the former head of Egyptian intelligence during the Mubarak era. Qandil's statements of condemnation do not scare Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, who launched the attack for electoral purpose

ghanistan, Mr Obama's big first-term goal was to close the military accounts in the Muslim world so that the US could refocus its attention on the Asia-Pacific region. The US troop presence in Afghanistan concludes in 2014. But the scaling down there and in Iraq has already freed up resources to go east.

olicy. But the issue 1s deeper than that. The Obama administration has declared it HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027109 --- PAGE BREAK --- wants to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and, surprisingly, it means what it says. Only a year after troops withdrew from Iraq, that country is not talked about in Washington, like a

ed us. Fine, but relentlessly keep the pressure on them to improve their rule. Had we begun this process with Abdullah Saleh of Yemen in 1978 or with Mubarak in 1981, things could have been very different by 2011. But we didn’t. TB: Egypt might be the test case. DP: Well, it’s a bit late. Mohammed Mors!