Islamic soccer moms for global change
Robin Wright goes looking for moderate Muslims in the Middle East, and finds them everywhere she looks.
Lesson 4: Watch out for the soccer moms. That's how I'd describe Ghada Shahbender in Egypt. A middle-aged mother
of four athletic teenagers who was in the throes of a divorce,
Shahbender had never joined a party or voted — until May 2005, when
she became infuriated by televised pictures of police watching as thugs
beat women, old and young, on referendum day. A week later, she went to
her first protest.
Of course, this being the Washington Post, she can't give Dubya any credit whatsoever for any of the changes she sees (it's as if the moon just happened to be there when Apollo 11 landed on it...), but Kerry supporter and dyed-in-the-wool Democrat Thomas P.M. Barnett thinks differently:
The ultimate legacy of Bush's "big bang" strategy, a decision I supported then and have always supported (even when I, at times, disagree vehemently with how the White House had played many of the resulting scenarios—specifically Iran), is that it did change everything in the region. We do a great job on postwar Iraq and we change everything. We do a bad job on postwar Iraq and we change everything. Either way, we change everything.Love it or hate it, the Iraq war has permanently altered Middle East politics. And considering how the status quo before the war was Libya pursuing nukes, Lebanon as a Syrian satellite state and Iraq shooting at U.S. jets in the no-fly zone, maybe things aren't so bad now after all...
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3/17/2008 7:15 PM
Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog wrote:
Ok, since I have about 1000 search results to deal with, I'm going to break this up. This post will be some recent links to Tom that do not address the Esquire article on Admiral Fallon. The next 'Tom around...
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