ABSTRACT
I came upon The Arab Street fairly late in my career. After a decade covering Asia for The Wall Street Journal, I was assigned to the Middle East, a region I knew little about. It was 1998, and the three years I covered the beat was, in retrospect, the buildup for the cluster of crises and quagmires it is today: lingering optimism from the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians was vanquished by the Second Intifada. Iraq had completed its devolution from a prosperous dictatorship in the 1980s to an isolated kleptocracy in what would turn out to be the twilight of the Hussein era. Egypt, once a fountainhead of Arab culture and scholarship, was slumping its way into authoritarian irrelevance.
