Make-or-Break Time in Iraq- December 31, 2007 For five years Washington-based officials and pundits have repeatedly made the mistake of predicting that the next six or 12 months in Iraq would be decisive. Under the hardheaded leadership of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker such talk has been banned: "Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases," Petraeus recently declared.http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/~r/wp-dyn/rss/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032401551_xml/~3/23... Egypt's YouTube Democrats- December 17, 2007 Is the cause of liberal democracy in the Arab Middle East dead It would be easy to jump to such a conclusion in Washington, given the Bush administration's shameless retreat from its "freedom agenda" and the recent campaigns by Arab autocrats to crush liberal politicians, journalists and civic activists. But it's also easy to overlook the fact that the Middle East's movement for human rights and democracy originated not in the White House but in capitals such as Cairo, Beirut and Amman. There,..http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/~r/wp-dyn/rss/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032401551_xml/~3/23... Fuses in Gaza- December 3, 2007 Watching the handshakes and arm-clutches of Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas at the Annapolis meeting last week, and listening to their sometimes soaring rhetoric about a Middle East peace, it was easy to forget that Israel is at war with the winners of the last Palestinian general election, that rockets fired by Palestinians are detonating in southern Israel nearly every day and that 1.5 million people of the future Palestinian state are living under what amounts to an Israeli military siege. The.http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/~r/wp-dyn/rss/linkset/2005/03/24/LI2005032401551_xml/~3/23... |