St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Bahman Farmanara, with drooping eyes and a protruding gut, looks less the artiste and more the Hollywood producer he used to be.

When American diplomats were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, at the height of the Iranian revolution, one of the most galling aspects for Americans following the drama was that the fresh-faced spokesperson for the student hostage-takers was a young woman known as Sister Mary who spoke like an American.

Iran's government insists that its nuclear program is peaceful and transparent, but it remains a highly sensitive subject, as a Post-Dispatch reporter discovered last week when he photographed the entrance to a nuclear facility a few miles east of Iran's old capital.

Americans tend to think of Iran as a troublemaking sort of place - throwing its weight behind terrorists, seizing U.S. citizens as hostages and forever railing against American values and interests.

The dozens of market stalls that line the oldest souk in Damascus were open for business but the hundreds of customers who usually throng these ancient streets were nowhere in sight.

If the sentiments of this Euphrates River city are any gauge, those planning the U.S. war on Iraq had best gird for hard times ahead, not just in Iraq itself but in the region beyond.

The most notorious television station in the Middle East mixes straightforward news and entertainment with equally straightforward calls for the destruction of Israel.

Getting an audience with a senior official at the militant Muslim organization Hezbollah is routinely a matter of multiple requests, patient follow-through and the navigation of multiple armed-guard checkpoints at the complex of nondescript office buildings that form the headquarters for the self-styled "party of God."

A key figure in the suicide-bomb attacks in Israel over the past two years says the United States should prepare for similar treatment if it attempts a military occupation of Iraq.

Radical Islamic groups in Lebanon draw a distinction between their cause and that of Iraq or al-Qaida.

Usamah Hamdan is a soft-spoken man who pads around his office in socks and a pullover sweater, more like a university professor than the Lebanese representative of what the United States calls a major terrorist organization.

The Palestinian leader of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon says that his group will remain focused on Israel, its primary enemy, regardless of what the United States does in Iraq.