Word: lebanon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...threats to international order are bigger today than at any other time since the end of the cold war. The most immediate source of instability emanates from Iraq, where the country's civil war risks igniting a region-wide conflict. Across swaths of the greater Middle East--from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories to Afghanistan and Pakistan--armed militants are undermining the authority of U.S. allies. Anti-U.S. regimes in Iran and North Korea have accelerated their pursuit of atomic arsenals. In Africa, genocide, poverty and disease threaten the survival of millions. And in the shadows lurks the danger...
...Rice has been slow to recognize the extent to which the U.S.'s prestige has declined. In 2005, the convergence of elections in the Palestinian territories and Iraq and the popular uprising against Syria's presence in Lebanon spurred Rice all but to declare that Washington was guiding the march of history. In a speech at the American University in Cairo, she criticized the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for failing to liberalize and said, "For 60 years, my country pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region ... and we achieved neither. Now we are taking...
Rice's new restraint reflects a broader reworking of the democracy agenda that dominated U.S. foreign policy after 9/11. Two factors have contributed to that change. The first is the reality that free elections in places like Lebanon and the Palestinian territories have handed power to fundamentalist groups like Hizballah and Hamas that have little interest in pluralistic, secular governance. Whatever the ultimate benefits of implanting democracy in the Middle East, in the short run it's more likely to damage U.S. interests than serve them...
...ratings are even more dismal than Bush's, and Abbas is struggling to prevent clashes among rival factions from escalating into civil war. And then there's the trouble with Rice herself. She did herself few favors in Arab eyes by failing to restrain Israel's bombing campaign against Lebanon last summer. Her refusal to negotiate with Syria baffles diplomats in the region, who believe the U.S. is missing an opportunity to peel Damascus away from its alliance with Iran. And Rice's relationship with Abbas, in particular, is frosty. A senior Palestine Liberation Organization official...
...said "failure is not an option in Iraq," but the Brookings researchers warn that he may already have failed there and not know it. They scoured the records of more than a dozen nations wracked by all-out civil war during the past 30 years - countries such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Somalia - and found that while historians could agree with hindsight on when those conflicts reached the point of no return, that point was never apparent to the leaders at the time. "This should sober us to the possibility that it may already be too late to save Iraq...