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President Bashar al-Assad is not about to go. Not yet. Not, maybe, for quite a long time. Newspapers in the Middle East are filled with stories about whether or not this is Assad's "Benghazi moment" – these reports are almost invariably written from Washington or London or Paris – but few in the region understand how we Westerners can get it so wrong.
Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism - and rarely more so than in the case of Iran.
Thank goodness we don't have to hear Newt Gingrich for a while. His statement that the Palestinians were an "invented people" marked about the lowest point in the Republican-Christian Right-Likudist/Israel relationship.
The Palestinians won't get a state this week. But they will prove - if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power - that they are worthy of statehood.
The old man's voice is scathing, his mind like a razor, that of a veteran fighter, writer, sage, perhaps the most important living witness and historian of modern Egypt, turning on the sins of the regime that tried to shut him up forever.
The old man is going. The resignation last night of the leadership of the ruling Egyptian National Democratic Party - including Hosni Mubarak's son Gamal - will not appease those who want to claw the President down. But they will get their blood. The whole vast edifice of power which the NDP represented in Egypt is now a mere shell, a propaganda poster with nothing behind it.
(Cairo, Feb 4) From the House on the Corner, you could watch the arrogance and folly yesterday of those Egyptians who would rid themselves of their "President." It was painful - it always is when the "good guys" play into the hands of their enemies - but the young pro-democracy demonstrators on the Tahrir Square barricades carefully organised their Cairo battle, brought up their lorryloads of rocks in advance, telephoned for reinforcements and then drove the young men of Hosni Mubarak back from the flyovers behind the Egyptian Museum.
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