The Londoner

The rich heritage of Tunisia, maybe the only place where the Arab Spring stands a chance JACOPO RIPANDA, “HANNIBAL CROSSING THE ALPS”/GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NY Modern-day Tunisians, more Westernized than most Arabs, see themselves as descendants of the great Carthaginian general who invaded Italy. T he Arab Spring began in Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town, at the end of 2010. In a desperate protest against the corrupt and oppressive government that had made it impossible for him to earn a living, food-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi stood before City Hall, doused himself with gasoline, and lit a match. His suicide seeded a revolutionary storm that swept the countryside and eventually arrived at the capital, Tunis, where it toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. Just weeks later, Hosni Mubarak was thrown from his palace in Egypt. Muammar el-Qaddafi was lynched later that year in Libya. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad may be the

A woman shows off her ink-marked finger after voting in Egypt’s referendum. Photograph: Andre Pain/EPA Egyptians lined up in their thousands on Saturday to vote on a controversial new constitution that has pitted the government and its Islamist supporters against liberal and secular opponents in a bitter struggle over the way ahead for the Arab world's biggest country after the 2011 revolution. President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who succeeded the deposed Hosni Mubarak last June, cast his ballot on the new basic law in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis shortly after the polls opened and was shown on state TV emerging with his finger dipped in ink, a measure to prevent fraud. Elsewhere in the capital there were long queues outside polling stations, where many supporters of the constitution said they were voting &

Before the ink was even dry on the Palestinian vote at the UN last week, headlines already started flooding on how Israel 'lost Europe.' The reality however, could not be further from the truth, as Israel continues to make stunning headway in its trade and bilateral relations with the EU . Anyone familiar with the mechanisms of the United Nations, where the Palestinians enjoy an automatic anti-Israel majority, never seriously doubted the outcome. Read the full story here.

Bloomberg is reporting that Chuck Hagel will "likely to be nominated as Secretary of Defense" having passed through the White House vetting process. The former senator from Nebraska will likely be touted as a bipartisan choice, though Hagel is hardly beloved by the GOP establishment these days and leading Republicans will likely be skeptical of many of his foreign-policy views, particularly on Iran. The National Review quotes a senior congressional aide: “This is someone who will be extremely skeptical of the idea that, if push comes to shove, we should use military force against Iran... Fairly or not, if Senator Hagel is nominated by the president to be secretary of defense, it will be broadly viewed as a signal that the United States is not going to use military force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”  Is that a fair description? Hagel did say during a 2006 visit to Pakistan that "a military strike against Iran, a m

A casual observer of the Arab world will most likely have concluded that the experiment in adapting political Islam to democracy has already failed. Almost two years ago, as the Arab revolutions began in Tunisia, it seemed a foregone conclusion that political pluralism on a western model would take the place of the ageing autocrats who had been kept in power for decades by their security services. But two years is a long time in revolutionary politics. Egyptians will begin voting tomorrow on their new constitution, against a background of bloody protests against the Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, who is accused of trampling over the liberal and secular opposition to create an Islamic state. While demands for a boycott of the vote appear to be weakening, the constitutional process will be tainted in the eyes of many Egyptians and observers abroad. The new constitution was drawn up by a Constituent Assembly controlled by Islamists after liberals and representatives o

Narciso Contreras / AP A Free Syrian Army fighter offers evening prayers beside a damaged poster of Syria’s President Bashar Assad during heavy clashes with government forces in Aleppo, Dec. 8, 2012. On the night of Nov. 29, a dozen Syrian opposition figures gathered at a student eatery in Moscow called Picasso, a cheap dive on the campus of the University of People’s Friendship whose walls are decorated with a mashup of images from the artist’s blue period. It may sound odd that enemies of Bashar Assad were gathering in a country that still had the dictator’s back. But these men and their organization may be Russia ’s only hope of influence in a post-Assad Syria. As young men, several of the Syrians at Picasso had studied at the university, which hosted the exchange programs that formed the early bonds between Moscow and Damascus in the 1960s. Indeed, the gathering could have been mistaken for a class reunion, as toa

Watching the nightmare in Syria unfold, you have to ask yourself: Could the Obama administration have made a worse hash out of the situation if it had tried? Short of an outright Iranian victory that saw the Assad regime's power fully restored, it's hard to imagine a more dire set of circumstances for U.S. interests. The Syrian state is well on its way to imploding. A multiplicity of increasingly well-armed militias are rushing to fill the vacuum. At the forefront of the fight are a growing number of radical Islamist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda. The prospect that Assad' s demise will be accompanied by the use (and/or proliferation) of chemical weapons and massive communal bloodletting gets higher by the day. Libya on steroids is what we're looking at, only this time not on the distant periphery of the Middle East but in its heartland, a gaping strategic wound that is likely to threaten the stability and wellbeing of Syria's five neighbors --

The pace of the conflict in Syria is accelerating. A series of military and political developments – reports that Bashar al-Assad's regime has fired Scud missiles at rebel-held areas, the encroachment of violence ever nearer to the centre of Damascus, and Russia's acknowledgment that a government defeat is possible – are in different ways signs that a decisive period may be approaching. If the Scud reports are true, this is certainly an escalation in the conflict that began in 2011. Scuds are based on Soviet technology of the 1950s, are cumbersome to fire and highly inaccurate – but they carry substantial high-explosive warheads and can do serious damage if aimed towards large targets such as urban districts. Syria's rebel forces have made some advances in the last weeks of 2012, though their extent and rebel units' ability to hold on

in Share When it comes to the grueling civil war in Syria, it's been a while since the relevant question was whether the regime of Bashar Assad would fall. It's only a matter of time until it does. The more pressing policy choice has been whether the United States would actively hasten its demise. When President Obama announced on Tuesday evening—a full 21 months after the first protests erupted against Bashar al-Assad’s rule—that the United States government would officially recognize the Syrian opposition, that question seems to have been answered in the affirmative. To the extent that this announcement signals a plan for deeper intervention into the Syrian crisis, it will no doubt be cheered by the growing chorus of commentators eager for Washington to assume a larger role. The rest of us, however, have good reason to be concerned. Simply put, it would be a mistake for

The last of the three conditions keeping Syria's dictator in power finally collapsed this week. The Assad dynasty, which has ruled the most strategic chunk of land in the Arab world for more than 40 years, may now face insurmountable odds. The three fundamental rules in a dictator's playbook of power have changed over the past two weeks. Although modern autocrats rarely rally a majority, my experience is that they need at least 30 percent support at home to survive serious opposition challenges. They also need powerful foreign allies to prevent international isolation or invasion. And they also need to prevent viable, credible, or recognized alternatives to their leadership so they remain the only source of order. President Bashar al-Assad is now closer -- much closer -- than at any point in the 20-month conflict to losing out on all three. And his use of imprecise but deadly Scud missiles against his own people this month demo

Evan Moore is a senior policy analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative . Last August, as the death toll in the Syrian crisis reached more than 25,000, President Obama declared that a red line for America's direct involvement would be if Washington were to see "chemical weapons moving around or being utilized" by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Yet last week, amid intelligence reports that the Assad regime had moved stockpiles of its chemical weapons and is preparing for a possible aerial attack using the deadly nerve gas sarin, the commander-in-chief appeared to back away from his original statement and draw a revised red line: now only the "use" of chemical weapons would be "totally unacceptable" to the United States. The problem here is that if or when the Assad regime crosses the president's red line, it will already be to

As long as unchecked American militarism continues, the phenomena of anti-Americanism will continue to spread and damage the ability of the US to find necessary allies in a strategically-important part of the world [EPA] The incongruity of it seemed to be nothing short of a betrayal. After lightheartedly dancing his way into the hearts of Americans and gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of their cherished cult of celebrity, the Korean rapper, Psy, whose song "Gangam Style" became the most watched video in the history of YouTube and made him a pop culture sensation, has been revealed to have a politically active past which places him directly at odds with the American mainstream worldview and which violently decries its most basic articles of faith . The man whom they enjoyed as an unthreatening, com