The Londoner

It is strange now to recall the jubilation with which the ‘Arab Spring’ was welcomed. Amid all the excitement of dictators toppling, many people here in the West, as well as some over there on the ground, forgot that the test of a revolution is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what comes next. Though they will never admit it, the Arab revolutions surprised western governments as much as the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. History is always producing the unexpected, which is why some of us never took it for granted that all this would have a happy ending. Now, almost two years after the Tahrir Square uprising, the fates of the revolutions and the region are at a deadly junction. The West’s swift initial support for the Egyptian rebels was understandable. First, because of the fresh memory of our failure to back the Green reform movement in Iran. But second, because it is just so easy to imagine from a position of comfort that when a dictator falls, a de

Mohammed Morsi may be the president of Egypt, but it's the Muslim Brotherhood that appears to be calling the shots. The Islamist group waited decades for a shot at power in the country and it isn't about to yield without a fight. He calls himself Sharif. He is a young man without a beard who wears a hoodie and athletic shoes. He doesn't look anything like a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather like one of those young revolutionaries his men are assaulting with stones, sticks and steel rods. ANZEIGE Sharif says that he hates these liberals and leftists, who began protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood and its president, Mohammed Morsi, after he acquired sweeping new powers through a decree issued in late November. Over the weekend, Morsi moved to rescind that decree, replacing it with a weaker one. But opposition protests have hardly abated as a referendum on the country'

The last week of November 2012 was a big one on the Israeli-Palestinian front. On the 65th anniversary of the partition resolution that created a Jewish state , the United Nations recognized a Palestinian one. Israel retaliated with the West Bank equivalent of sequestration: announcing it would move toward building settlements in an area east of Jerusalem called E1, which many observers believe would kill the two-state solution . European governments responded by threatening to withdraw their ambassadors. As Palestinians protested Israeli settlement moves, the U.S. response was “half-assed,” one source said. (Abbas Momani / Getty Images-AFP) And the United States? It mostly watched. In 2011, when the Palestinians first sought a U.N. status upgrade, the Obama diplomatic corps lobbied so hard against it that one State Department official joked that “sometimes I feel like I work for the Israeli government.” This time, by contrast, the U.S. largely went through t

Qatar   is located in Western Asia , occupying the small QatarPeninsula on the northeasterly coast of the much larger Arabian Peninsula . Its sole land border is with Saudi Arabia to the south, with the rest of its territory surrounded by the Persian Gulf . A strait of the Persian Gulf separates Qatar from the nearby island state of Bahrain. Qatar has been ruled as an absolute and hereditary emirate by the Al Thani family since the mid-19th century. Formerly a British protectorate noted mainly for pearl hunting, it became independent in 1971. Since then, it has become one of the region's wealthiest states due to its enormous oil and natural gasrevenues . In 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani became Emir when he seized power from his father, Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, in a peaceful coup d'état.  The most important positions in Qatar are held by the members of the Al Thani family, or close confidants of the al-Thani family. Beginning in 1992, Qatar has built int