Epstein Secrets

d with potentially cataclysmic consequences nobody dares imagine. This Friday, the shock came in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad runs one of the Middle East's most repressive regimes. Across the country, protesters have grown ever more emboldened in recent weeks, and on Friday they poured into the street

t Ford referred to in justifying his own decision to pardon Nixon. Otherwise, Mubarak's fate could become just one more chapter in the long saga of Middle Eastern leaders who rise and fall because of the whims of fortune. Nikolas K Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign

ll be finished swiftly and with few casualties. Much-ballyhooed successes — like bombing Saddam Hussein's armies out of Kuwait and helping to drive Slobodan Milosevic from power — as well as minidramas like the 1975 rescue of the American cargo ship Mayagiiezfrom the Khmer Rouge and the 1983 invasion of Grenada,

f anything resembling a grand strategy, the Obama administration seemed, and still seems, primarily animated by a desire to reduce its footprint in the Middle East. It is in Syria that the puzzling absence of American leadership has served to confirm just how important the United States still is. Without U.S.

ke the Europeans, he spent years watching the wars of succession in Yugoslavia until he ordered the bombing of the troops of then Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Even George W. Bush, who, at least during his first term, was convinced that the United States had to defend freedom and democracy, with military

ble middle class. The gap between rich and poor will persist as a source of popular dissatisfaction. To make matters worse, by 2030 more than half the Middle East's population will still be under 34. This persistent "youth bulge" will challenge even efficient regimes, as demands for jobs, social services and u

allenges like combating transnational terrorist networks and deflecting the rampages of cornered dictators, like Qaddafi and, a decade before that, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. Military force is not always the best answer. But, when it is, Europe must be able to provide its share. With all European governments c

asbah in Tunis and Martyrs' Square in Tripoli will, like the Havels of the Middle East, come to power as politicians. We haven't heard the last of the Middle East's millennial generation. Juan Cole is director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan and the aut

ometimes 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 States can prevent the theocracy in Iran from acquiring