But while oppressive governments were initially caught off guard by the new media tools, those still in power appear finally to be catching on. In some cases they are happily embracing social networking to play Big Brother in a way never before possible.

Many governments struggling with dissent appear to be using a double-barreled strategy to fight back against the so-called Facebook revolutions: classic repression and by promoting their own views using the very same platforms.

“The thought police already have a presence online in these countries,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “And they have a very heavy presence on Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks. They go out there and intimidate people. And they accuse people of being heathens. And call for their heads.”

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The matter was at the root of wry commentary accompanying a flurry of visits not seen in years.

In the past few weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon have all held high level meetings in Jerusalem. Barak is scheduled to meet with Panetta and with Vice President Joe Biden. Peres will meet with President Barack Obama, as will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will fly to Washington for a much anticipated meeting on March 5.

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The age old rivalry between Russia and the West is being played out in the Middle-East, pitting the largely Sunni Muslim Arab states against Russia’s ally  in the region- Iran. An important player bridging the gap between Shi’ite Iran and the Arab Sunnis is Lebanon’s Shi’ite resistance movement known as Hezbollah (Party of God.)

Hezbollah has enjoyed enormous popularity across the entire region, perceived by many as the champions of the Arab world, successfully standing up to the bully in the playground, Israel. There was a time when the portrait of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the walls of homes and cafes from Baghdad to Casablanca. Yet, following a relatively cool reception of Nasrallah’s speech on the 16^th of February , one got the distinct impression that the Lebanese resistance leader may not enjoy the same popularity he once did with the Arab masses.

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Syria looks like Libya all over again. A brutal dictator uses his military to repress his country’s protests. A civil war erupts. And, oh yes, a split opens among American liberals over what to do about it.

With a few notable exceptions, the conservative movement has been of one mind on foreign policy issues since 9/11. All right-wingers supported the Afghanistan war, and virtually all supported Iraq, as well. Every conservative believes President Obama has been a craven appeaser of America’s enemies, and now all believe that pressure should increase against Iran, even if that means another war in the Middle East.

Liberals have shown no such unanimity. They were divided not only on Iraq but also on President Bush’s 2006 surge, Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, and the intervention in Libya. Views fall roughly along two lines. Dominating the party since Bill Clinton’s ascension are liberal hawks who believe it is in America’s interest to use military power abroad to promote human rights and expand democracy. More popular among the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party are attitudes skeptical of the use of force in major wars. (The only exception to this split is over the use of drones, which nearly all Democrats support).

Though Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War when he was a state legislator, as president he is closer to the liberal hawks camp. The best account we have of the decision-making on Libya, from Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, has the president explicitly declaring that America needs to have an expanded conception of its role in the world. Just looking after its own affairs, attending to its national interests, is “not how America leads,” Obama said. The rationale Obama employed in a speech delivered at the National Defense University in March of 2011 was the closest he has come to defining an Obama doctrine.

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The four of us were riding in the back of a blazing red minibus at the beginning of April, approaching the strategic oil town of Brega, where the worst fighting of the conflict had been taking place. Our driver was a teenage boy, like his friend in the passenger's seat. The so-called front in this war was always changing. But we had already passed the last rebel checkpoint and we knew whatever front existed was beginning to reveal itself.

Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.

We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.

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I can speak in absolutes about the quality of his work. No one reported the Middle East with greater clarity and nuance than Shadid. No one brought the humanity of the people of the region, people who live in a perpetual state of stress even when they are living in the comparative comfort of Beirut and Tel Aviv, to the wider world with a surer touch than Anthony.

He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony's dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.

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On Sunday, the Arab League announced that it had formally decided to “open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks” and to “ask the UN Security Council to issue a decision on the formation of a joint UN-Arab peacekeeping force to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire.”

This is the strongest call for foreign military intervention that has yet come from the international community regarding Syria, as more and more Syrians are getting caught up in government crackdowns and increased fighting between the Syrian army and a growing armed opposition movement. Yet questions about the nature and timing of such an intervention are far more complex than in Libya.

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Today, Abu Yaman’s refinery has become a military base, its main pipelines destroyed, state hospitals stormed by secret police, electricity cut and makeshift home clinics overwhelmed with casualties as Homs endures an onslaught of rockets and mortars in the regime’s worst massacre of civilians since the uprising began 11 months ago.

With rights group Avaaz reporting at least 258 people killed — including 72 children and 42 women — in a single night of shelling just hours before Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad, analysts warn the onslaught in Syria marks a new chapter in which further bloodshed appears inevitable.

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Rebel fighters from the so-called Free Syrian Army were protecting about 5,000 demonstrators calling for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad. One was hoisted onto the shoulders of the protesters. Victory, it seemed, was approaching. Several other neighborhoods nearby saw rebels set up checkpoints and essentially take control.

Four days later, however, GlobalPost returned to the area and encountered a very different scene.

The Syrian army had returned.

Turning off the Damascus highway east of the city, we were stopped by several soldiers manning a checkpoint of sorts. Our driver said we were foreign journalists. He looked in and waved us on. The same incident happened twice more. The soldiers had a yellow plastic ribbon tied to their jackets that clearly indicated they were on the side of the regime.

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Three senators and and 18 representatives -- all Democrats -- have signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning the deal (and remember, the administration still isn't saying what equipment, exactly, it's sending to Bahrain). Here's the key section of the letter:

We recognize the limited nature of the sales, and we acknowledge that the Bahraini government has taken some positive steps with respect to human rights in recent months. However, it has not done enough to justify the sale of any military items or services to Bahrain. Moreover, if the Administration wishes to reward the Bahraini government for any progress, there are other methods that do not involve strengthening the Bahraini military or security forces.

Tragically, even a brief survey of reports from reliable sources makes clear that the Bahraini government continues to perpetrate significant human rights violations.

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A protest movement in January may have led to the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak, but most Egyptians are left wondering how much has actually changed. Were the heady days of street demonstrations truly a revolution or a popular uprising that has resulted in a military takeover?

Political reform has moved at a snail's pace. Some of the most brutal hallmarks of Mubarak’s autocratic regime have returned, including arbitrary detention, military trials and torture.

And an already stagnating economy is deteriorating amid ongoing workers’ strikes and sporadic violence.

Many now blame the country’s ruling military leaders, the once revered Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed power in the transition following Mubarak’s departure.

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But while many Cairenes on the street have broken free of the fear that silenced them before, journalists and analysts say fear — or at least a sense of caution — still pervades many of the newsrooms trying to document a chaotic city in transition.

Ziad Akl, an analyst with the government-financed think tank Al-Ahram Center for Political & Strategic Studies, said that although the country’s military rulers allow a slightly “higher ceiling” than ousted President Hosni Mubarak, media outlets and researchers like himself are still “very much bound and constrained by the state.”

“We’re still in the very same cage,” he said. “It’s a just bigger cage.”

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In an interview with GlobalPost, the leader of the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Riad al-Asaad, denied fears that Syria is sliding into civil war after escalating attacks by his men against the Assad regime’ security forces.

And though short on weapons and ammunition, Col. Asaad — no relation to the ruling family — insisted his rebel army of defected soldiers would keep attacking the regime and protecting protesters. He also denied receiving support from regional players, and said there is no need for a new Benghazi in Syria.

GlobalPost: What is the Free Syrian Army and how many soldiers does it have?

Colonel Riad al-Assad: The Free Syrian Army is the army of the people, the army of the nation. It grew out of the Syrian army of the tyrant who is killing the people in Syria. The Free Syrian Army became organized three months ago, due to increasing defections from soldiers and officers. It now has divisions all over Syria, starting in Daraa [in the far south] and ending in Jisr Shughour [in the far northwest]. The number of soldiers in the Free Syrian Army now exceeds 10,000, and defections are increasing daily.

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Lamri, like many persecuted gays, lesbians and transexuals in the region, looked to Beirut for refuge.

“I was scared for my security and for the future of my family,” says Lamri, 39, who came to Lebanon on a tourist visa and immediately set about securing a work visa so that she could stay longer.

A founding member of an underground lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights association in Algeria called Abu Nahas, Lamri's way of life had begun to provoke anonymous death threats from Islamist groups and persistent calls and visits to her workplace and family home from authorities.

Finally, the pressure became too much for her to bear.

“My brother-in-law told me: 'If you die or go to prison and we find out why, your family will be disgraced and I'll divorce your sister,'” Lamri says over coffee recently in an east Beirut café. She is tall with long jet-black hair and speaks in hushed words punctuated by the occasional toothy giggle.

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The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it's not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit's captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and "their offspring" to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit's imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs ("devils' spawn," "savages," "animals") and, well, it's a call for mass slaughter.

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The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait...

In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.

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If ever there were a complete foreign policy disaster, it has been the Iraq war. Most foreign policy failures are imperfect idiocy. At least elements of the failed policy made sense at the time. By invading Iraq, the U.S. carried idiocy to perfection. The Iraq war was a catastrophe for the United States in every way—strategic, economic, political and moral.

Strategic. From the end of the Gulf War in February 1991 to the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, the U.S. pursued a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq. Though far less costly than the invasion of Iraq would prove to be, this dual containment policy was expensive, in part because of the cost of U.S. occupation of part of Iraq and frequent bombing of the territory that Saddam still held.

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A frame-by-frame analysis of this exclusive GlobalPost video clearly shows the rebel trying to insert some kind of stick or knife into Gadhafi's rear end.

GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton said there is some question as to whether the instrument was a knife from the end of a gun, which Libyans call a Bicketti, or a utilitiy tool known as a Becker Knife and Tool, which is popularly known as a BKT.

This latest video discovery comes as international and human rights groups call for a formal investigation into how the former Libyan leader was killed. In video clips that have emerged of his capture, Gadhafi can be seen injured but alive. Later he is seen with what appears to be gunshot wounds to his head and chest. According to the Geneva Conventions, however, abuse of prisoners under any circumstance is not permissable.

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Located on a bucolic, breezy hilltop in the Western Galilee, it offers hitchhikers and weekend visitors breathtaking vistas of the Hula Valley, in Israel, and of the southern Lebanese countryside.

Its principal source of income is tourism, especially that of the bed and breakfasts operated by individual families. Weekend after weekend they attract urban dwellers thirsty for a weekend of birdsong, green hills and organic brunches.

In 1988, when their middle child, Gilad, was two years old, Noam and Aviva Shalit moved to this remote outpost like many others who sought a clean, quiet life in tune with nature. They own and run one of these small hostelries.

Gilad, a scholarly boy who graduated high school with honors, was always a little sickly. His medical profile was sufficiently low to enable him to opt out of combat service in the army, but he chose to volunteer and follow his older brother, Yoel, into the armored corps.

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