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	<title>Michael Totten</title>
	<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten</link>
	<description>Just another Pajamasmedia.com weblog</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:16:45 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Anvil of Syria</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Young’s latest piece in NOW Lebanon is a must-read for Syria watchers. There’s a lot to it and it’s impossible to summarize so you should read the whole thing, but here’s the bottom line: Last summer, I used this space to speculate that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, if it sensed that it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/14/the-anvil-of-syria/</link>
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		<title>Hezbollah Car Bombs in Georgia and India</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A car bomb just exploded outside the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi, India, and wounded the wife of a diplomat. Another car bomb was defused outside the Israeli Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. These were almost certainly placed there by Hezbollah as they coincide with the fourth anniversary of the assassination of its military commander Imad [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/13/hezbollah-car-bombs-in-georgia-and-india/</link>
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		<title>The Saudis Will Want the Bomb, Too</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s no secret that Saudi Arabia will want nuclear weapons if Iran gets them. Riyadh has been saying so for years and said it again a couple of days ago. It ought to go without saying that this would be bad. The Middle East is one of the most conflict-prone places on earth. The inhabitants [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/12/the-saudis-will-want-the-bomb-too/</link>
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		<title>I’m Back</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve spent the last several days at a remote location in Central Oregon wrapping up my book Where the West Ends. I only have about one more day’s worth of work left before it is finished. Of my three books so far, this one, I think, is the most accessible and the most entertaining. Now [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/12/i%e2%80%99m-back/</link>
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		<title>How to Manipulate an American</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I can’t think of a single head of state anywhere in the world I’d be less interested in interviewing than Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The man lies like he breathes, as a friend recently put it. Just about everyone who interviews him comes off looking ridiculous, partly because he would never sit down with someone who [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/07/how-to-manipulate-an-american/</link>
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		<title>The Flight of the Intellectuals Continues</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A few years ago I interviewed Paul Berman shortly after he published his must-read book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, about writers who have done good work in the past but who now draw a perverse sort of moral equivalence between Somali-born human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Swiss-born Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Now [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/06/the-flight-of-the-intellectuals-continues/</link>
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		<title>A Separation</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won a Golden Globe last month for his most recent film, A Separation. I haven’t seen it yet, but he has done fine work in the past. Regime censors somehow tolerate his work even though they don’t like him and he doesn’t seem to like them. But now he’s coming under [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/04/a-separation/</link>
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		<title>Arab Spring or Islamist Winter?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My essay on the Arab Spring in the January/February issue of World Affairs is now out from behind the pay wall. The phrase “Arab Spring” is a misnomer. The political upheavals sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria are concurrent yet different phenomena, and it’s premature to assume that any of them, let alone all of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/02/arab-spring-or-islamist-winter-2/</link>
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		<title>Intervention in Syria? Don’t Count on it</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hussein Ibish over at NOW Lebanon explains—accurately—why the United States has an interest in seeing Syria’s revolution wrapped up as quickly as possible. A civil war in Syria would likely have a strongly sectarian character and the potential to spill over into neighboring states such as Lebanon and Iraq, posing a significant threat to regional [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/02/02/intervention-in-syria-don%e2%80%99t-count-on-it/</link>
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		<title>Sandmonkey Sues Salafist</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Mahmoud Salem, aka the Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey, is taking fat-headed Salafist preacher Yasser al-Bourhami to court for inciting violence against Christians. Sandmonkey is a Muslim, by the way, not a Copt. And he&#8217;s a real stand-up guy. Last year he ran for parliament in Cairo and lost, which is a shame. Egypt could become a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/31/sandmonkey-sues-salafist/</link>
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		<title>Damascus Gripped by Insurgency</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Syrian army briefly lost control of suburban Damascus, but seems to have retaken it, at least for the moment. Things are moving fast there, though, and the regime could lose control again at any time. Much of the country is apparently now a war zone. Syria has come a long way from non-violent demonstrations [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/30/damascus-gripped-by-insurgency/</link>
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		<title>Writing in Foreign Cities</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My friend and former PJ Media writer Nancy Rommelmann uses a review of Pico Iyer’s book The Man Within My Head as a jumping off point for thinking out loud about writing in foreign cities. She says she always knows almost instantly when she arrives in a new city if she’ll be able to write [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/30/writing-in-foreign-cities/</link>
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		<title>The Sectarian Monster</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sectarian violence in Syria between Sunnis and Alawites is worsening by the week. Now that a non-violent movement for reform and change has molted into an armed insurrection, Bashar al-Assad’s Shabiha militia is shooting and hacking even children to death. Syria is part of a pan-Arab nation, according to the Assad family’s cynically adopted Baath [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/27/the-sectarian-monster/</link>
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		<title>Winter in Cairo</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Eric Trager, who has forgotten more about Egypt than I have yet learned, writes in The New Republic about the unhappy birthday of Egypt’s botched revolution. Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule… It is tempting to believe that things might have turned out differently had Washington worked harder to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/25/winter-in-cairo/</link>
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		<title>In the Wake of the Surge is On Sale</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My second book, In the Wake of the Surge, is on sale. You can get a trade paperback for 17.99. The price on the Kindle version has been temporarily lowered to just 7.99.]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/24/in-the-wake-of-the-surge-is-on-sale/</link>
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		<title>Quote of the Day</title>
		<description><![CDATA[“I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.’” Neil Peart, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/23/quote-of-the-day-26/</link>
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		<title>Thanks to You All</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I want to sincerely thank all my readers who donated money last week so my wife and I could visit her brother in Boston one last time before he died. It was a rough week, but I’m glad she didn’t have to go by herself. I will send everyone a personal thank-you note, but in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/23/thanks-to-you-all/</link>
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		<title>Scott Trockman, 1964 – 2012</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My brother-in-law Scott Trockman died from cancer in Boston a few days ago. Nearly everyone who knew him thought he would beat this, partly because he was so young, but also because he bravely suffered in silence and didn’t want to worry and frighten everyone else. My wife and I did not know his cancer [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/22/scott-trockman-1964-%e2%80%93-2012/</link>
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		<title>I Have to Check Out for a While</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My wife’s brother is terribly sick. He has what we all thought was a minor case of cancer, but all of a sudden it’s bad. Real bad. He is way too young for this to be happening to him. I am stunned and haven’t really processed this yet. He lives far away and we need [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/12/i-have-to-check-out-for-a-while/</link>
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		<title>The Blackness</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Andrew Tabler lived and worked in Damascus for years. He visited Beirut most weekends—you would, too, if you had to live in Damascus—and that’s where I met him. He came up with a great phrase to describe the utter inscrutability of the Syrian regime. He called it “the blackness.” “Fog” isn’t the right word because [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://pjmedia.com/michaeltotten/2012/01/11/the-blackness/</link>
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