Epstein Secrets

ti is struggling with the give-and-take of Lebanese politics. Life goes on in the freewheeling way that has long drawn repressed, frustrated Arabs to Beirut. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030050 --- PAGE BREAK --- 22 Hezbollah is a political party with a militia. That's a big problem. Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas par

st. It's over: Enough of the nameless graves that whisper of horror, enough of the 20th-century police states in the 21st-century. Yes, it's over for Ben Ali and for Mubarak. It's over for Qaddafi, yes it is. How far it's over for the other Arab despots and autocrats, whether of the oxymoronic "republics"

rmined. Lebanon: Lebanon has once again proven its pivotal position in the Syrian conflict's regional playing field. A fourth car bomb rocked south Beirut on January 2" —another symbolic blow to Hezbollah, whose support of the Alawite regime in Damascus continues to disgruntle Sunni elements in the reg

e Egypt, which will have witnessed three constitutional referendums since Mubarak's overthrow, this is the first such process since the overthrow of Ben Ali. The national assembly will vote on the document article by article. To be adopted, the draft must be approved by at least two thirds of the 217 ele

l recently, it is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime ministe=. Iran's appeal has been tainted by the brutal tactics of its allies, in=Damascus and Beirut, who may remain strong materially but have lost out in=terms of image and ideas. The long-term decline of the Islamic Republic in the Middle East p

y a desire for an Islamist system. In Egypt a=d Tunisia, Islamist movements capitalised on the fall of presidents Hosni =ubarak and Zine al- Abidine Ben Ali. However, even in these countries (espe=ially Egypt), their popularity declined rapidly. As the impact of the Arab uprisings reverberated through th

pposition figure in Damascus. "I prefer to see the tyrant behind bars." Kareem Fahirn reported from Misurata and Tripoli, Libya; Anthony Shadid from Beirut, Lebanon; and Rick Gladstonefrom New York. Reporting was contributed by Denise Grady and J. David Goodman from New York; and Eric Schmitt, Mark Maz

otably President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. One of them, also referring to former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, read: "Ben Ali escaped, Mubarak is in jail, Qaddafi was killed. Which fate do you prefer, A

fe, separate religion from politics, emancipate women, and move past the debris of the Ottoman Empire. Fittingly enough, that great movement, with Beirut and Cairo at the head of the pack, found its chronicler in George Antonius, a Christian writer of Lebanese birth, Alexandrian youth, a Cambridge ed

re demanding to be rid of him. The senior commanders of the armed forces cast him aside, and he joined his fellow despot, Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had fallen a month earlier. From Cairo, the awakening became a pan-Arab affair, catching fire in Yemen and Bahrain. As a monarchy, the latter

d. EFTA00586650 19 This is but a variant of the soft bigotry of low expectations. If and when the end comes for Gadhafi, he shall fall alone. In Beirut and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, and in the streets of Iran and Shiite Iraq— where Musa al-Sadr still enjoys a saintly aura—there shall be joy. The undo

di had not struck him—and she was acquitted). But there was enough tension and discontent within the country—and in particular with Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali— that had it not been for the unfortunate Bouazizi, some other incident might well have caused the overthrow of the regime. Next, for a revolution

ed consequences. Marwan Muasher is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, where he oversees the Endowment's research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East. Muasher served as foreign minister (2002-2004) and deputy prime minister (2004-2005) of Jordan, and his career has spanned the ar

demonstrations sparked by the self-immolation of a twenty-six-year-old man who had been reduced to scratching out a living as a humble street vendor. Ben Ali, along with his hated wife and family, chose to go into exile before a single shot had been fired. In Egypt, if press reports are to be believed, the