the lawmakers called on the Foreign Ministry to take appropriate actions with regard to the regional developments as follows... Adopting transparent stances in defense of popular movements, opposing the foreign meddling, and employing the public diplomacy to reveal the Western powers’ double-standard approach toward the developments.

...how is this new world to be built? The guiding model is to be found in Eastern Europe and the colour revolutions. In short, by using American soft power and public diplomacy to reshape the socio-political scene in the region, the aim is to transform the people's revolutions into America's revolutions.

There is no question that Osama bin Laden’s death is a significant milestone in the U.S. fight against Al Qaeda. But the youth-led uprisings in the Middle East ultimately pose a greater threat to Al Qaeda than bin Laden’s death. It is therefore critical that the United States maintain support for the revolutions’ call for political and economic reforms as they continue to unfold.

The "Arab Spring" that's swept the Middle East over the last few months has brought to prominence a new news source: Al Jazeera English. The fortunes of AJE got a boost when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sang its praises in a Senate committee hearing...

What will make Turkey effective in the eye of new rulers and peoples in the Middle East will be its 80 something years of experience in democracy, European Union membership bid and creativity of its civil society.

Opinion: The killing of Osama bin Laden marks a unique melding of American hard and soft power, and a boost (with legs) for President Obama

“Seen from Europe, this is part of the return of America. The story a few years ago was America’s relative decline, but this shows a return,” argues Dominique Moisi, a leading intellectual at the French Institute of International Relations. “We see that democracy prevails as an aspiration and democracy prevails as a force."

From the monolithic American view, Egypt and Syria would not appear to be especially different countries, although the outcomes of efforts to embrace democracy have been very much so. Meanwhile, pro-democracy movements have encountered varying degrees of success in Tunisia and Yemen and abject failure in Bahrain, where Saudi security forces were part of the crackdown, as well as in Algeria.