This is a great interview with Kanan Makiya on Iraq.
Kanan Makiya: I’ve reached a point where I don’t even bother to reply to such critics. They are just not serious people any more; they are expressions of failure, inactivity, and irresponsibility, rather than critics of substance and with serious ideas. My case has always rested […]
This article is form a few months back but I really think it deserves some additional google juice. It’s pathetic to me how much truck the wildest conspiracy theories have on the internet, and if one more person I haven’t talked to in years forwards me that ridiculous flash animation “proving” that the pentagon […]
A fascinating post from Iraqi Shirko Mula Qadir detailing the history and crimes of the Baath. There was a lot of good information covering the fascist and continental race theory influences of the Baath and other totalitartian tendencies in Paul Berman’s excellent Terror and Liberalism, but over all I have seen very little […]
This article by Victor Davis Hanson may have lost some of its relevance as conditions in Iraq continue to improve, but its rhetorical strengths and prescient nature have only been heightened. The following excerpt is particularly well done.
With elections and freedom accorded to the Shia and the Kurds, we must renew, not disavow, our […]
Seekerblog has some good analysis of a recent Iraq poll that was heavily referenced on the blogosphere last week, but deserves more elucidation. Click and check out the charts and commentary related to .
The new survey revealed that 61.5 percent of Iraqis believe that their country is headed in the right direction compared to […]
Michael Totten is resuming work for Friends of Democracy, which is now posting English translations of notable Arabic language blog posts from Iraq. Here’s an open letter to the nesxt president.
Dan Darling writing at WoC made a comment that someone should really be collecting information about how people-power movements like we’ve seen in Lebanon, Ukraine, and Georgia the the last couple of years, ahve managed to get off the gound, leading a commenter to post information about Otpor’s struggle against Milosevic, and the fascinating […]
Austin Bay has posted parts of an interview he did with Benazir Bhutto. Here’s the money quote:
BAY: There’s a democratic surge in the Middle East�what can stop it?
BHUTTO: There is certainly a surge towards democracy. This year has been a remarkable one. In some ways like the year when the Berlin Wall fell and […]
The Hezbollah rally as Oxford, Mississippi.
But for the massive crowds of white segregationists, it was the beginning of the end. A sort of last hurrah. Similarly, when you have a group funded by Iran (i.e., Hezbollah) holding a gender-segregated rally with a blatantly contradictory message (”No to Foreign Intervention” and “Thank you, Syria”) you are […]
Michael Totten just posted a large excerpt from an article printed in the Lebanese Daily Star that I have had in my drafts since early yesterday. I guess great minds think a like. I haven’t put anything together on it but I’d encourage you to read Totten’s post.
Things seem to be changing hourly […]
Slate has an impressive assessment of Hosni Mubarak’s rule over Egypt. There’s no doubt that there is an appetite for democratic reform, and that Mubarak has run the country as an autocrat, but by ME standards he hasn’t done all that badly by the average Egyptian which is why many people point out […]
Fareed Zakaria has an article at Newsweek about the mid-east melt. He says that Bush deserves credit for getting the big picture right, but still has a lot of details unsettled. And it’s the details that will make or break things.
Events in the Middle East over the past few weeks have confirmed the […]
David Adesnik notes that many pundits who opposed the war in Iraq are now barely registering happiness over the prospect of more freedom in Lebanon. Particularly noting these Kissingerian quotes from Matt Yglesias.
There’s no really clear sense in which the Syrian sphere of influence in Lebanon is bad for the United States of America. […]
Michael Young at Reason, who was in Beirut when the protests started, weighs in on the recent events in Lebanon. The interesting part about this piece is the open questioning about how libertarianism reconciles the current events against its pre-dispositions.
Like Ronald Reagan in Eastern Europe, Bush has shown in the Middle East that […]
Much is being made of the announcement by Hosni Mubarak that opposition groups will be allowed to run against him in the next election. Pharaohs Egypt points out some of the more subtle shifts in the national psyche.
Someone hit me now. Someone punch me in the face because I still cannot believe what I […]
Der Spiegel has an interesting article called Democracy at the Tip of a Sword: George W. Bush’s Infectious Virus. It generally lauds the spread of democracy in the Middle East and gives credit where it is due with regards to the Iraq war and its break with Germany’s typical “teahouse policy” of coddling dictators. […]
Mark Steyn was one of the first writers I read who really made the case for Iraq. In his usual snarky tone Steyn does a great job of collecting the various events of the last month into a cohesive narrative, delivering the key Lebanese quote that I mistakenly left out of my last post.
Why […]
Er… Freedom is on the march?
I always did like the “dominoes of democracy” theory that under lied the Bush administration’s rationale for regime change in Iraq and addressing the root causes of terrorism (lack of freedom). While my concerns about the outmoded management style of the administration were tragically answered by the numerous errors […]
Michael Totten has posted an article on TCS detailing various reconsiderations of the war in light of the successful elections in Iraq. Including these gems:
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said something similar to Fareed Zakaria. “What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view […]
TNR has published an analysis of the recent Zawahiri tape.
But while Al Zawahiri is willing to make a nod to the Western left, he makes no similar overture toward reformers in the Arab world. On the question of whether Sunni Islamists of any shade should participate in Arab elections–be they in Gaza and the West […]