As I write, men in expensive suits are sitting in slick offices all around me, talking on the phone to Almaty and Bangalore, swapping bonds and oil wells.

The men — and they are mostly men — are of many nationalities: Russian, French, Libyan, Nigerian, Italian, Turkish, Indian, Brazilian, Ghanaian, Kazakh, Chinese, Japanese and more. They live here, however, because London wants them. London doesn’t mind if they drive up the contemporary art market, occupy Knightsbridge or crowd into overpriced sushi bars near Berkeley Square, so long as they keep British banks and trading floors in business. Foreign billionaires — we’re talking the .001 percent, not the 1 percent — find London more hospitable than Paris, more cosmopolitan than New York. One of them told me not long ago that New York has become downright provincial by comparison, with a business community dominated by Wall Street rather than global entrepreneurs. So he stays here — in the “right” time zone, halfway between New York and Moscow — where he can always catch a fast flight to the Far East.

Young men in fatigues hang around outside the offices of the Transitional National Council, carrying rifles and flashing V (for victory) signs at visitors. Inside, older men in leather jackets sit on sofas drinking tea, while temporary officials cope with clashing appointments and race up and down the hallways. It’s just how one imagines the Smolny Institute, Lenin’s St. Petersburg headquarters, in 1917: amateur, enthusiastic, disorganized, rumor-filled and slightly paranoid, all at once. In Smolny, though, there were no ringing cellphones to add to the general cacophony.

The white altar cloth in the Catholic Church of Nyamata is still stained brown with blood. Shoes, dresses and trousers worn by families massacred within the sanctuary lie, gently decaying, atop the pews. The hole in the church’s iron door, blown open years ago by a grenade, will never be repaired: The Catholic Church of Nyamata is now a museum, a memorial to the thousands of people murdered here in April 1994, at the peak of the Rwandan genocide.

In the past 48 hours, Anders Behring Breivik has been described as a racist, a white supremacist and an anti-Islamic fanatic. News reports of his arrest are now accompanied by analyses of Europe’s failure to absorb its immigrant population, commentary on the rise of far-right political parties, discussions of the threats posed to Muslims living in Europe. Having mistakenly assumed at first that the story of terror in Oslo belonged to the narrative of the war on terrorism, we are now placing it firmly within the equally familiar narrative of white racism and anti-Islamic fanaticism. 

Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was extremely cheerful when we met for lunch recently. In a deliciously cool restaurant on a very hot day, he regaled me with stories of what happened after our last lunch, in February 2007. Following that meeting, I had written a column in which I quoted him asking me, in effect, why Americans did not promote democracy in Tunisia.

Foreigners visiting New York or Chicago in the 19th century often came away with conflicting feelings. Some found American cities ugly by comparison to their European counterparts: They seemed vulgar, blatantly commercial, lacking in taste. The natives had higher living standards but they were crude, and the ethnic mix — German, Irish, Italian, Jewish — was terrifying.

For the record, I’d like to clarify one point about my column of last Tuesday:  When I wrote that “There was no NATO discussion of the operation, no debate, no vote, no joint planning,” of the Libya mission, I meant that there was no political planning. As Ambassador Ivo Daalder rightly pointed out in his letter to the editor today, there was a great deal of military planning.

That was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January 2010, making what she called “an important speech on a very important subject.” And there was more:

One more response to Charles Krauthammer, as well as to Bob Kagan and Reuel Marc Gerecht:

Of course a “U.N.” no-fly zone would really be a U.S. one — but that’s precisely the point. Everyone is nervous about the use of U.S. force and U.S. money in the region, even those who are sympathetic to democratic and American values. That’s why any form of U.S. intervention will be disguised as something else.

In response to Charles Krauthammer's blog post, let me quote, once again, the first sentence of his column of March 4: "Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi." And let me repeat: This is a fantasy. No voices anywhere, in any part of the world, are calling for U.S. intervention to bring down Moammar Gaddafi. There is no "strange moral inversion" or "hypocritical double standard" in the international debate about Libya. There is some discussion of aid and of a no-fly zone -- but only as a U.N. or NATO action, only as a last resort, only to prevent genocide (Rwanda is being cited as a precedent) and only if it can be done with as little unilateral "American" input as possible. Even though it might save them, at least some Libyans oppose even this: The slogan "No foreign intervention: Libyan people can manage it alone" has its own banner and its own Facebook page. This, not the question of whether we should send in the Marines -- and that was a joke, by the way, about the shores of Tripoli -- was the first point of my own column.

If you closed your eyes at the right moment during the security conference here on Saturday, everything suddenly melted away. The German luxury hotel vanished, replaced by cement walls and fountains. The northern European winter became a hot summer day along the Nile. Hillary Clinton, in a brown suit and gold necklace, morphed into Condoleezza Rice, in a gray suit and pearls.

If you closed your eyes at the right moment during the security conference here on Saturday, everything suddenly melted away. The German luxury hotel vanished, replaced by cement walls and fountains. The northern European winter became a hot summer day along the Nile. Hillary Clinton, in a brown suit and gold necklace, morphed into Condoleezza Rice, in a gray suit and pearls.

As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery - just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy. No, he had said. None whatsoever. But now he was busily eating his words: If Egypt blows, anything could happen.

As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery - just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy. No, he had said. None whatsoever. But now he was busily eating his words: If Egypt blows, anything could happen.

Violent street demonstrations, followed by the toppling of a dictator, are an exhilarating way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society. They are not, however, the best way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society.

Violent street demonstrations, followed by the toppling of a dictator, are an exhilarating way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society. They are not, however, the best way to bring democracy to an authoritarian society.