Sublime

I smiled back the rictus of false friendship.

1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

President Clinton’s ‘anti-terrorism’ conference at the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm el-Sheikh was regarded by Arabs as a humiliation.

Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.