This year can't be as bad as the last

摘要

The brash little city-state of Dubai jovially claims to have won a Guinness record for the world's biggest-ever fireworks display, but other Arab capitals greeted the new year with gloom rather than glee. From Cairo to Beirut and Damascus to Baghdad, the historic hubs of Arab civilisation, commentary on the past year was uniformly bleak-and the prognosis for the coming one laden with doom, too. In a provocative editorial, Ghassan Charbel, editor of Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, spelt out unvarnished truths he ascribed to an unnamed senior politician. We should drop all pretence, suggested Mr Charbel's anonymous interlocutor.