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Recommended reading from the Sunday papers:
Lee Smith's A Liberal in Damascus, in the NYT.
Pico Iyer's NYT book review of Christopher de Bellaigue's "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs."
...Civil wars, de Bellaigue is agile enough to see, often take place invisibly.
The guiding method of ''In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs'' is to zoom in on a handful of individuals whose cases, unraveled in detail, can give us, you could say, the people's version of (and a sequel to) Ryszard Kapuscinski's classic portrait of pre-Revolutionary Iran, ''Shah of Shahs'' (1982). We see loyalists who fought for the revolution and now mostly fight against it; widows in the holy city of Qom who sidle up to mullahs and say, ''Excuse me, sir, would you be interested in doing a good deed?'' (knowing that the religious leaders
are more than ready to pay to do the deed); the ''thick-necks,'' thugs of the bazaar...The results, as befits a famously sinuous and sophisticated culture, are seldom what we expect (one of the strongest defenses of the revolution, as giving people new opportunities to go to school, to learn musical instruments, even to choose their own partners comes, as it happens, from a dissident intellectual who has had six consecutive newspapers shut down). Yet the vignettes also cohere to form a withering portrait of a lost and disenchanted country of heroin addicts, 13-year-old prostitutes and grace notes mocked by the ruins all around...
And Richard Wolin's (subscription only) piece, "From Poland to Ukraine, Self-Limiting Revolution Bears Its Democratic Fruit, in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education. [Thanks to DP and RZ for the links.]