Kuwait Snapshot: Imprisoned for Tweeting (Motaparthy)

Armed security officers wearing balaclavas led Nasser Abul, blindfolded and shackled, into a courtroom in downtown Kuwait City on July 19.  Accused of crimes against the state, he answered the judge's questions from a wood-and-metal cage in the courtroom. His mother, watching the proceedings, hoped her 26-year-old eldest son would finally be released after nearly two months in detention. The judiciary has refused to grant her wish.

Abul found himself in jail because of a few Tweets.

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Jordan Feature: Meaningful Changes or Token Reforms? (Yom and Tarawneh)

King Abdullah of JordanLast week, the Jordanian regime presented a series of Constitutional changes purportedly addressing questions of power between the monarchy, the Cabinet, and the legislature.

But are the amendments significant? Sean Yom, writing for Foreign Policy, and Naseem Tarawneh, writing on the blog The Black Iris, present two views.

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Iran Analysis: Supreme Leader = Machiavelli? (Sadjadpour)

Khamenei's inflexibility has so far served him well. His unwillingness to bend, however, has made it more likely that the Islamic Republic itself will have to break. As a young advisor to opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi recently told me, "We don't want a revolution; we've seen how it turns the country upside down. But they're giving us no other choice."

Machiavelli died in 1527, distrusted by all sides and disliked by the people he aimed to serve. It would be poetic justice if one of his most practiced disciples suffered the same fate.

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Bahrain Snapshot: The Regime Tries An "Anti-American" Narrative (Gengler)

In a July 6 interview with Egyptian journalists carried in the Al-Ahram daily, a leading Bahraini revealed that his country's February uprising was "by all measures a conspiracy involving Iran with the support of the United States," the latter aiming "to draw a new map" of the region. "More important than talking about the differences between the U.S. and Iran," he insisted, are "their shared interests in various matters that take aim at the Arab welfare."

Who is this Bahraini conspiracy theorist? A radical Arab nationalist, perhaps? Or a leader of the popular Sunni counter-revolution that mobilized successfully against the Shia-led revolt? Not exactly. In fact, he is none other than Marshal Khalifa bin Ahmad Al Khalifa: Minister of Defense, Commander-in-Chief of the Bahrain Defense Force, and, as his name indicates, a prominent member of Bahrain's royal family. His outburst decrying American duplicity in Bahrain is but the latest in a string of similar incidents and public accusations that once more raise the question of political radicalization in Bahrain. But this time, in contrast to the usual narrative, the radicalization is not emanating from the country's Shia majority.

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Tunisia Feature: The Rise of a "New Islamist Movement" (Lynch)

Tunisia's post-revolutionary politics are being profoundly shaped by the meteoric rise of the long-banned Islamist movement al-Nahda. Decades of fierce repression during the regime of former President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali crushed almost every visible manifestation of Tunisia's Islamist movement. The banned movement played a very limited role in the revolution. But since Ben Ali's flight and the triumphant January 30 return of exiled leader Rached Ghannouchi, al-Nahda has grown with astonishing speed.

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Iran Opinion: "We Should Side with the Clergy" in Tehran Showdown (Nasr)

Ahmadinejad is a threat to clerical supremacy, but without him, Khomeinism is even more vulnerable to reformist challengers. The alternative would be a right-wing ideological state -- nationalist, fundamentalist, populist, and ruled by militarism, something akin to the Japan of the 1930s. And that cannot last. In this contest between Iran's elite factions, the world should be rooting for the clergy -- their victory will bring about the quickest end to the Islamic Republic.

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Yemen Feature: Who Tried to Kill President Saleh? (Phillips)

By joining the opposition movement, Ali Mohsen and other defectors from the regime have not necessarily heralded a new era for the Yemeni people. Instead, they appear to be settling old scores.

The inner workings of Saleh's Yemen are incredibly opaque. Think of a series of concentric circles with him at their center: That's the regime.

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Sudan Feature: Falling Apart on the Border in Abyei (Fick)

On Wednesday, we posted an article on the escalating violence on the border between the Republic of Sudan and Southern Sudan, due to become independent in July. Yesterday a Southern Sudan minister said more than 150,000 people have fled because of the fighting.

Maggie Fick picks up the story for Foreign Policy magazine:

In the past week, things have fallen apart in Sudan. With the clock ticking down toward the date when Africa's largest country officially breaks in two, the borderlands between the two would-be states have caught on fire.

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Syria Snapshot: US Official "Our Problem --- Assad Wasn't Brutal Enough"

On Tuesday, The Cable blog of Foreign Policy magazine posted an entry, "Inside the Obama Team's 'Shift' on Syria". In fact, there was little of substance on current US policy --- far more interesting was this revelation, tucked away halfway down the article:

"A lot of people were wrong. The general assessment [inside the administration] was that this wouldn't happen, that Assad was too good at nipping these movements in the bud and also that he was not afraid to be brutal," one administration official said. "All of these things combined made this more of a surprise and made it much harder to deal with."

For the first three weeks of the protests, the analysts told the policy makers that it was unclear whether the opposition had wide support throughout the country and whether the protest movement would be able to sustain itself and grow.

"Then, gradually, every day we saw the protests get larger, and we realized this is going to get worse and that [Assad] wasn't going to listen to anyone else," the official said, explaining the administration's recent stream of increasingly harsh condemnations of the Syrian government's actions. "It was a reaction to the events on the ground."

Libya: Getting the Rebels Wrong (Abdurrahman)

Photo: New York TimesThe recent remarks by Adm. James Stavridis, NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe, alleging "flickers in the intelligence of potential al Qaeda, Hezbollah" among Libyan rebels are indicative of a disturbing trend in much of the discussion --- and reporting --- on Libya over the past several weeks. Ambiguous statements linking Libya and al Qaeda have repeatedly been made in the media without clarifying or providing appropriate context to such remarks. In many instances, these claims have been distorted or exaggerated; at times they have simply been false.

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