Free Republic

* Al Qaeda — which operated as an efficient organ of command and control — has been smashed to pieces. Just two of its former top 20 leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be still alive and free — and those two are in hiding, seemingly without regular organizational contact with Islamist cells anywhere in the world. Since December 2001, the two have managed to send a total of six authenticated messages from their hideouts.... * Targeted governments have begun to fight back. In Pakistan, more than 13,000 schools suspected of propagating extremist ideas have been...

The battle for the streets of Lebanon reached new heights yesterday when hundreds of thousands of anti-Syria protesters, some with Lebanese flags painted on their faces, swamped the centre of Beirut. Few had any doubt that it was the biggest demonstration the city had ever seen, or was likely ever to see, easily outstripping last week's pro-Syria rally, which drew a crowd of about half a million. The Lebanese opposition had been stunned by the size of Hizbullah's rally last week and spared no effort to out-do it yesterday. Buses were chartered to bring demonstrators to the capital from around...

3/14/2005 Filed under: RevolutionsMiddle EastSyria Lebanon — “HUMAN TSUNAMI” COVERS BEIRUT UPDATE: Scroll to the end for all latest updates on the protests!Hizb’allah is showing up less and less in the wire — which may or may not be good. But right now, the focus is on the opposition and what moves they will make in face of the pro-Syria protest last week that brought Kharami back to the premiership. Yesterday, protestors got a little creative, by coordinating with each other to make a giant flag using colored boards. Various opposition groups as well as Hariri’s Tayyar Al Mustaqbal (Future...

An emboldened Lebanese opposition mobilized more than 800,000 people to demand an end to Syrian military domination of Lebanon, hurling a potent challenge to the Syrian-backed government here. Beirut city official Mounib Nassereddine said the estimate of 800,000 did did not include demonstrators who were still arriving from all parts of the country ahead of the rally. Thousands of Lebanese had made their way throughout the morning to the capital by car, bus and boat, heading for Martyrs Square and the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, assassinated exactly one month ago in a bomb blast. Lebanese television aired...

Bush gave a transformational speech Tuesday at the National Defense University at Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC. I am sure we will see the Europeans and their like minded US compatriots in the Democratic Party and the Main Stream Media claim what he said there was just blather and nothing new if they comment on it at all. But this speech was quite a thing, really. Along with affirming that the USA has entered into a new century with a new foreign policy direction that Bush is not going to waver from, he also aimed a shot across the...

For those who have been keenly following the war against the terrorists as well as those who finance and rouse them, Stephen Schwartz needs no introduction. Journalist and an author (most recently of "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror"), he has been a vocal opponent of Wahhabism and an unmasker of many tentacles of the Terror International. He contributes frequently to Frontpage Magazine, the "Weekly Standard" and Tech Central Station. Today, I wanted to ask him about his take on the progress of the war on terror, what to do about Saudi Arabia,...

The leaders of about half of Egypt's rickety opposition parties sat down for one of their regular meetings this week under completely irregular circumstances. In the previous few days, President Hosni Mubarak opened presidential elections to more than one candidate, and street demonstrators helped topple Lebanon's government. The mood around the table in a battered downtown Cairo office veered between humor and trepidation, participants said, as they faced the prospect of fielding presidential candidates in just 75 days. "This is all totally new, and nobody is ready," said Mahmoud Abaza, deputy leader of the Wafd Party, one of Egypt's few...

Condi Rice is heralding a shift in long-term US policy to transform the Middle East Timothy Garton AshThursday February 10, 2005The Guardian We are told that Condoleezza Rice received her unusual first name because her parents liked the Italian musical term condolcezza , meaning "with sweetness". What might condoleezza mean? A gifted Italian translator emails me that "it doesn't immediately suggest sweetness to an Italian ear". Yet there's no doubt that the new US secretary of state has conducted an impressive charm offensive during her lightning tour of Europe. She has presented a more elegant face, spoken a more nuanced...

There's an obscure branch of mathematics known as "catastrophe theory," which looks at how a small perturbation in a previously stable system can suddenly produce dramatic change. A classic example of the theory is the way a bridge, after bearing immense weight for many years, can suddenly collapse because of a new stress. We are now watching a glorious catastrophe take place in the Middle East. The old system that had looked so stable is ripping apart, with each beam pulling another down as it falls. The sudden stress that produced the catastrophe was the American invasion of Iraq two...

Saudis Join Call for Syrian Force to Quit LebanonBy HASSAN M. FATTAH Published: March 4, 2005 EIRUT, Lebanon, March 3 - Saudi Arabia told Syria on Thursday to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, adding substantially to Syria's international isolation just a day after Russia joined Western nations in making a similar call. Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, went Thursday to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, hoping to secure Saudi support before a coming Arab summit meeting. But Saudi officials told Reuters and The Associated Press that Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdel-Aziz had delivered an unusually blunt rebuff. Egypt, the other key...

WASHINGTON, March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- In the first substantial shift of public opinion in the Muslim world since the beginning of the United States' global war on terrorism, more people in the world's largest Muslim country now favor American efforts against terrorism than oppose them. This is just one of many dramatic findings of a new nationwide poll in Indonesia released today. "In a stunning turnaround of public opinion, support for Bin Laden and terrorism in the world's most populous Muslim nation has dropped significantly, while favorable views of the United States have increased," said Kenneth Ballen, President of Terror...

<p>Where are we? At this midpoint of the Bush administration, engaged as we are in conflict throughout the world, are we winning?</p> <p>The great democratic crusade undertaken by this administration is going far better than most observers will admit. That's the good news. The bad news is a development more troubling than most observers recognize: signs of the emergence, for the first time since the fall of the Soviet empire, of an anti-American bloc anchored by Great Powers.</p>

Some ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students that one cannot understand an event simply by attempting to reconstruct a chain of causality leading up to it. Instead, one must immerse oneself in the context, to fully understand the moment in which the event took place. If you get the context right, you can understand what came before and what comes after. That sort of understanding is important both for historians and leaders. If that ancient wise man were alive today and were asked to summarize the unique characteristics of this historical moment, he would say "revolution."...

WITH anti-Syrian protesters massed in the heart of Beirut last night and the US redoubling its insistence that Syrian troops pull out of Lebanon, the regime in Damascus - which handed over Saddam Hussein's half-brother to authorities in Iraq at the weekend - has begun making extraordinary concessions under pressure. As Israeli Government officials provided comprehensive briefings to foreign diplomats yesterday, linking Syria to Friday's suicide bomb attack at a crowded Tel Aviv nightclub that disrupted almost three months of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the picture of Syrian discomfort was complete. A military regime long used to coercing and...

Lebanese government quits Prime Minister Omar Karami announces government's resignation amid growing protests in the wake of former Prime Minister Hariri's killing By Roee Nachmias and Ali Waked Lebanon's Syrian-backed Prime Minister Omar Karami, who has been facing growing popular pressure following the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, said on Monday his government was resigning. Resigning Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami Photo: AFP "Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead," Karami told parliament in Beirut....

<p>Just watching CNN. They Pro-Syrian government has just resigned. Huge celebrations in Beirut.</p>

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia The popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine have raised the morale of the small opposition movements in Belarus and Moldova, and they said Wednesday that they were more determined than ever to continue the struggle for democracy. . "It will take time, but it will come," said Andrei Safonov, a political analyst and journalist from Transnistria, a separatist and internationally unrecognized enclave in eastern Moldova that is ruled by an authoritarian group backed by Moscow. . Civil society groups attending a conference in Bratislava on Wednesday, the day before President George W. Bush was to meet with President...

No words can do justice to the march of freedom underway in the Middle East and what it took to lead us there. Liberals will not want to hear this, but they know it’s true: What has happened in formerly Saddam’s Iraq and the Taliban’s Afghanistan—which, hopefully, could propel a flowering of freedom in a region more resistant than any other—is a tribute primarily to the efforts of one man: George W. Bush. For students of international relations, the elections in Iraq, capping those in Afghanistan in October, serve as a case study of how individuals, as opposed to larger...

OP-ED COLUMNIST this is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here? Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody's vantage point changes. "Why not here?" is a Kuhnian question, and as you...

“Talk Is Cheap...Let’s Go Play!” Delivered to the California Libertarian Party Convention Chuck Muth President, Citizen Outreach Los Angeles, California February 19, 2005 Thank you. Let me begin my remarks by predicting that in the next two years, Republicans are going to blow it. When Ronald Reagan was in the White House, we were told government couldn’t be restrained because Democrats controlled Congress. When Republicans gained control of both Houses of Congress in 1994, we were told nothing could be done because the Democrats controlled the White House. When in 2000 Republicans gained control of the White House AND the...