December 28, 2005
It was a publicity stunt, pure and simple—a photo op, a silly event, but it got me out of the office, and well, I’d had a few when the embassy guy called me up the night before to see if I would go and cover it.
So there I am, at 8am on a [...]

Had a few things I wanted to post — notably the verdict against Ayman Nour, which is going to be a repeat of the Saad Eddin Ibrahim case — but alas, no time. My immediate reaction is sympathy for Nour’s two teenage sons, which are the clearest sign I’ve seen that he is a good [...]

December 20, 2005
We settled into the cramped confines of the armored humvee, its interior looking for all the world like some teenagers messy pickup truck—Coke cans, food wrappers, magazines and then the less prosaic stuff, gas grenade, assault rifles, ammo.
The lieutenant in the front seat was a friendly guy from Nebraska, in fact the whole [...]

The secret to Saddam Hussein’s dashing style:
Things may be going poorly for Saddam, on trial for genocide in Baghdad, but, ironically, the ex-despot’s misfortune has been the making of the tailor. On television channels across the Middle East, the Cesur brand gets free advertising worth millions every time Saddam is shown, attired in a dark [...]

So Algerian President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika decided to resurface [Le Monde, subscription] after weeks of rumors that he was on his deathbed. Bouteflika chose the 8pm newscast of the state TV channel on Saturday, during which he only appeared for a few minutes and looked haggard. His doctor, Messaoud Zitouni, a former minister of health, [...]

Guess which MP wants to ban the sale of alcohol during Christmas and New Year? What’s that? The Muslim Brotherhood? Nope. It’s Ragab Hilal Hameida, the only elected Al Ghad MP (from the dissident faction, naturally).
Hemida denied that his call for the ban was the idea of the Muslim Brothers who have made similar demands [...]

Here’s an interesting take, by a Lebanese journalist, on why young Syrians don’t really get the Lebanese independence movement because than can’t begin to imagine it as a separate place:
In clear imitation of the one expression of Lebanese political will that had been most painful to the Syrian regime, the authorities commandeered one of Damascus’ [...]

There is an excellent story from the current issue of The American Prospect that is making the rounds on American political blogs on John Bolton’s role as US Ambassador to the United Nations. It covers a lot of ground, but there is one thing
I’d like to pick out and focus on in particular, because I [...]

“Controlled Reform in Egypt: Neither Reformist nor Controlled” is a long article I just wrote on the elections for Middle East Report Online. It looks at the elections from the perspective of the regime’s attempts to control the reform process over the past year, when it had repeatedly seized the initiative on major reform steps [...]

Some Iranians have been making nasty remarks lately, but this goes too far:
TEHRAN (AFP) – An extremist Iranian Islamist group announced it was working on a film about the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat entitled “34 Bullets for the Pharoah”.
The documentary, produced by the “Committee for the Glorification of Martyrs for the World [...]

I have been collecting material written on the Egyptian elections and will publish a list tomorrow. But to get things started, here is a damning indictment of the elections by my old friend Khairi Abaza (yes, I have friends even in that institution). I don’t agree with him on every point (more on that tomorrow) [...]

Bouteflika’s situation seems to be worsening in light of the absence of information about his health. Today’s Le Monde has a report from Algiers:
In the absence of television footage of the recovering president, alarmist rumors are spreading. Memories of the long months of whispering that accompanied the sickness and death of Houari Boumedienne at the [...]

I don’t really have anything to add on the death of Gibran Tueni, apart from saying that it moved me more than Rafiq Hariri’s, both in a personal sense and in the realization that the Syrian-Lebanese situation seems to be spinning out of control. Or perhaps more accurately, that Syria, a country I know better [...]

December 13, 2005
So I missed him.
The old man. The fallen lion, the devil on earth. The one who looms over this whole post-invasion mess, whose name I write in articles a dozen times a day.
The day I attended Saddam’s trial, he decided not to. Of course there will be other days. The trial is moving [...]

It’s rather pathetic, but Mubarak has decided to the enormous imbalance in the composition of the People’s Assembly by appointing five women and five Copts.
That means that out of six Coptic MPs, only one (Minister of Finance Youssef Boutros-Ghali) has been elected, and that election was fixed in 2000 and probably fixed again in 2005! [...]

The Lebanese journalist and MP Gibran Tueni, who headed the excellent newspaper an-Nahar, has been killed:
Anti-Syrian journalist and lawmaker Gibran Tueni was killed Monday in an explosion that targeted his convoy, according to two Lebanese TV stations that are allied with him. Police did not immediately confirm.
LBC and Future TV said Tueni was killed in [...]

I used to follow Israeli politics much more closely a few years ago, but reading Haaretz recently reminded me that there is nothing more exhilarating than following the ups and downs of politics over there. This amusing article (shame about the racist ads, though) is just a small reminder of the high-stakes game being played [...]

So he’s not gay after all: earlier this week, Al Midan, an Egyptian tabloid that rarely ventures out of the gutter, published pictures of what they said was Gamal Mubarak’s fiancée. Gamal, 41, has been Egypt’s most eligible bachelor for years but was never spotted with any companion. That had led to rumors spreading that [...]

For the last few days, this ad has been displayed prominently on the website of Haaretz, the Hebrew and English-language Israeli newspaper. It reads, “if the Arab population in Israel reaches 40%, the Jewish state will be nullified. For the only solution, click here.” All that above a picture of Benyamin Netanyahu, the former prime [...]

I forgot to link last week to Zibniew Brzezinski’s well thought-out article about why the Bush administration should not refer to Islamism as the same as communism.
By asserting that Islamic extremism, “like the ideology of communism . . . is the great challenge of our new century,” Bush is implicitly elevating Osama bin Laden’s stature [...]

Asia Times Online describes an Al Qaeda compilation CD (why call it state-of-the-art, though?) that is being sold illegally in South Asia and the Middle East. The CD is quite well put together, apparently, reminding me of the high production quality of an Iraqi insurgency video a few months ago. That seemed to have been [...]

Arab leaders are notoriously cagey about their personal health, and right now, Algeria has not one but two top officials receiving treatment from French doctors amidst high levels of secrecy, says Le Figaro.
Yazid Zehrouni, 67, the minister of interior, has been in a French hospital since October, ostensibly for a kidney transplant. He has appeared [...]

The web editor of balady.net, an Egyptian Islamist website, has been arrested:
Egyptian authorities have arrested the second online journalist in six weeks, closing his website and confiscating work material.
Ahmed Mahmoud Abdallah, also known as ‘Abu-Islam’, is editor of the Balady Net news site and former editor of the now defunct opposition newspaper Al-Shaab. He is [...]

With the death toll now at eight, hundreds of wounded and more than 1300 Muslim Brotherhood supporters in jail, the end of election season is rather grim. It all looked so much more hopeful during the first round, which was carried out with minimal fraud and interference (but excessive vote buying.) Baheyya’s collection of pictures [...]

At least two dead, dozens wounded, massive police presence preventing people from voting in some districts, and clear targeting of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Welcome to “New Thinking“. There’s some fine and extensive reporting by the AP here. Results, as always, won’t come out until very late tonight or tomorrow at the earliest, but Reuters quoted [...]

So the State Dept. is fine-tuning its statement in light of the grumbling over last week’s praise of Egypt’s conduct of the election. The point seems to be that while not perfect, these elections are a vast improvement on what happened previously. On the one hand, it’s true that the size of the opposition in [...]

Some interesting links I don’t have time to blog about at length:

U.S. Is Given Failing Grades By 9/11 Panel:

The federal government received failing and mediocre grades yesterday from the former Sept. 11 commission, whose members said in a final report that the Bush administration and Congress have balked at enacting numerous reforms that could [...]

There is a must-read story in the Washington Post about the pitfalls of the ever-expanding rendition program run by the CIA:
In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the [...]

Sometimes you really have to wonder whether there’s really a serious anti-Mubarak constituency in Washington, or whether it is simply Jackson Diehl’s pulpit as deputy editorial editor at the Washington Post that makes it seem like it. For years now, Diehl has been the most vocal critic of the Mubarak regime and a gung-ho supporter [...]

I missed when it came out, but via David Rees, the genius creator of Get Your War On and My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, take a look at this excerpt from a New York Times story by their Baghdad bureau chief John Burns:
To a great extent, the American story in Iraq has been one [...]

I’m off to Alexandria for the weekend, so no further posts until Sunday. In the meantime, here’s a collection of of links to coverage of the third round of elections, which seemed just as violent as the second:
Violence mars Egyptian elections (BBC)
Tempers flare as final Egypt election showdown kicks off (AFP)
Egypt’s Parliamentary Vote Marred by [...]

I just noticed something rather strange: I turned to Al Jazeera to take a look at their coverage of the third round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections today and all I saw was one of those multi-colored standby screens. All their other channels — Al Jazeera Live, Al Jazeera Children — were fine. But when I [...]

December 1, 2005
The light here is, quite simply, beautiful.
I don’t know if it’s the time of year, or we’ve just been lucky and not had many hazy days but at sunrise and sunset, it’s that sharp golden light that I associate with the desert.
Especially at sunset, the buildings spread out before our hotel turn a [...]