Epstein Secrets

hat is after all the Bush/neocon/democracy activist line. Take U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's 2005 speech at the American University in Cairo or Bush's second inaugural address -- both reviled by "realists." It would be nice if some of the critics now admitted that such speeches were prop

reasonable bargain: they could have safety and be left alone so long as they led apolitical lives. He once gave away the crux of his worldview to a Baath Party functionary. People have "primarily economic demands," Assad said—they aspire to a plot of land, a car, a house. Those demands could be satisfied "

could have been avoided had the Bush administration, in honoring its "Freedom Doctrine," engineered Mubarak's smooth departure several years before Cairo exploded. Obama inherited a dysfunctional relationship with Egypt from his predecessor. This is not to excuse the administration's faltering and so

eelection bid, Maliki's Electoral Commission disqualified more than 500, mostly Sunni, candidates on charges that they had ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. For the Obama administration, however, tangling with Maliki meant investing time and energy in Iraq, a country it desperately wanted to pivot awa

xperience, more educated and prosperous and linked to Europe than the norm. As the rebellion made its way eastward, it skipped Libya and arrived in Cairo, "the mother of the world." There, it found a stage worthy of its ambitions. Often written off as the quintessential land of political EFTA_R1_002

the Turks. Yet decades earlier, Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez -- a man of supreme cunning and political skill -- had ridden the military and the Baath Party to absolute power, creating a regime in which power rested with the country's Alawite minority. The marriage of despotism and sectarianism begat th

upply, there is no dearth of hopeless young people, whose numbers will continue to grow in the coming years. Indeed, whatever resemblance events on Cairo's Tahrir Square bear to May 1968 in Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it would be premature to proclaim that freedom has prevailed. Wh

e case in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Syria is a paradox in this Arab season of revolt. It has an authoritarian regime dominated by a corrupt Baath Party - a relic of the age of dictators that is being swept away in so many other countries. But President Assad, relatively young at 45 and wrapped in t