Could there be a more accurate description of the Barack Obama-Gordon Brown message of congratulations to the fraudulently elected Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan? Now we have the venal, corrupt, sectarian Karzai in power after a poll far more ambitiously rigged than the Iranian version, and – yup, we love him dearly.

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For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the Internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?

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Israeli investigations of the Gaza war, its government officials announced, were “a thousand times” fairer than the Goldstone investigation—a preposterous claim, given Israel’s constant inability to conduct fair inquiries of its own—and that his mission “gave legitimacy to the Hamas terrorist organization.”

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Almost 19 years to the day after Saddam Hussein’s legions invaded Kuwait—and less than 18 years since the U.S. coalition liberated it—the Croesus-rich emirate is still demanding reparations from Baghdad as if the dictator of Iraq was still alive.

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Let us now praise famous men and their fathers that begat them. The famous man—he should be much more famous—is the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim whose wonderful “reappraisals, revisions and refutations” is coming out in September under the simple title: “Israel and Palestine.”

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You don’t overthrow Islamic revolutions with car headlights. And definitely not with candles. Peaceful protest might have served Gandhi well, but the supreme leader’s Iran is not going to worry about a few thousand demonstrators on the streets, even if they do cry “Allahu Akbar” from their rooftops every night.

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The Iranian regime, led by a supreme leader who is frightened and a president who speaks like a child, is now involved in the battle for control of the streets of Iran. The ayatollah appears more worried than he’d care to admit.

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Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as “human shields” by the Taliban and we shall say that we “deeply regret” innocent lives that were lost.

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“We acknowledge,” the letter says, “that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous.”

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