Free Republic

PETER ACKERMAN'S QUEST TO TOPPLE TYRANNY Regime Change, Inc. by Franklin Foer   Post date 04.14.05 | Issue date 04.25.05 When the Rose Revolution began in the fall of 2003, there was little reason to hope for a happy ending. Twelve years earlier, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia had stepped from communism into civil war. The old Communist eminence Eduard Shevardnadze may have brought greater stability when he took over the government in 1992, but his corrupt rule also generated huge new pools of ill will among the populace. Some of this disgust manifested itself in small, peaceful street protests. But...

Azar Nafisi reveals the decadence of studying literature in Tehran In a house in Tehran in the 1990s eight women were talking about literature. Someone was thinking of Jane Austen and the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Since the Iranian authorities had decreed that girls could be married off at the age of nine, one of the women in the group proposed a local variation: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless...