When students and liberals initially occupied Tahrir Square, it looked like it might be a passing thing.

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.

The U.S. presence and American missteps made ethnic violence in Iraq far worse than it would have been otherwise after Saddam Saddam Hussein's fall.

Foreigners who speak Arabic in the Middle East are often assumed to be working for the C.I.A. or Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad.

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

I had some training on how to cope with hostage-taking.

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

By 2007, Iraqi society had completely collapsed.

There is no Afghan Awakening Movement.

The Taliban mostly attacks international and Afghan security forces. They rarely carry out attacks in markets.

For years, Lebanese have known that Palestinian camps like Nahr al-Barid and Ain al-Helwe - hopeless slums crowded with generations of disenfranchised Palestinian refugees who can't go home because of Israel, and can't work because of Lebanese laws - are awash with gunmen, criminals and, since the war in Iraq, al-Qaida inspired jihadists.

Lebanon does not have a powerful army.

Under Islamic law, adoption is difficult.

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime.

The Syrian border town of Qa'im was the main gateway Islamic radicals used to go to Iraq. Syria became the passageway for extremists from Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to fight a jihad against American forces in Iraq.

In October 2008, American commandos launched a cross-border raid into Syria to capture an Islamic militant known as Abu Ghadiya. He was accused of being one of al Qaeda in Iraq's main smugglers of fighters and money between Iraq and Syria.

Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.

Putin believes Russia is back, and he may be right.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.

If democracy brings an undemocratic group to power, is that a victory for democracy?

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.

Each time there is a conflict between Israel and Gaza, accusations fly over who started it, each side blaming the other.

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

Foreign aid projects have pumped billions of dollars into the Afghan economy.

The Israeli military believes it has destroyed all of Hamas's tunnels, or at least all the ones it knew about.

To be slapped with a shoe is a dirty insult in the Muslim world.

The dangers of an Afghan collapse are many: Afghan deaths, a loss of American prestige, a loss of NATO prestige, a moral blow to U.S. troops and veterans, a Taliban resurgence, huge setbacks for women, and greater power for Pakistan and Pakistani extremists.

Faced with the crippling sanctions, Iran could simply decide it is paying too high a cost to pursue its nuclear program and could opt for negotiations and reconciliation with the United States and other members of the international community. This is clearly the preferred option of American leaders.

A nuclear program has arguably worked as a deterrent for North Korea and other states - would Moammar Gadhafi have been deposed and summarily killed if Libya had had nuclear weapons? Iranians might not think so.

Afghanistan does have an air force: It has two C-130s. I saw one of them. It was nice, a gift from the United States. But two planes don't even make a Caribbean charter airline, let alone an air force for a country at war.

There weren't many weapons in Egypt in the 1990s. Police controls on guns were very strict back then. That is no longer the case in Egypt today.

President Bashar Assad's regime is in the unique position of being targeted both by Israel and supporters of al Qaeda.

Israel specifically does not want Syria to hand over weapons, chemical or conventional, to Hezbollah.

If Israel sees weapons moving toward its border, it acts.

Every war has its demons.

'Shabiha' is a difficult word to translate into English. It comes from the word Syrians used to describe the luxury Mercedes favored by the Assad family's operatives that the enforcers of the regime used to move money, smuggle weapons and intimidate opponents.

Every war has revolutionary justice.

Syrians need to prepare for the aftermath if the Assad regime falls. Atrocities that could be considered war crimes have been committed in this country, and Syrians should rightly demand that the perpetrators be held accountable.

Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.

Egypt has a presidential system. The president runs the state. Who the president is matters profoundly.

Egypt is the most populous Arab nation, the seat of Sunni Islamic doctrine, and has tremendous political, religious and social influence on the rest of the region. For better or worse, it will lead the rest of the Middle East by example. So goes Egypt, so goes the region.

On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There's no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.

Many in the U.S. military believe ISIS needs to be immediately, and repeatedly, smashed by American drones and warplanes.

The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine.

Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.

Hamas is a Palestinian political party with an aggressive militant wing.

Hamas has long been Israel's enemy, but in the wake of the Arab Spring, the group is empowered like never before.