Aborted

The OAU has its own experience of pre emptive action, and it would clearly need to be the focal point of an enhanced effort in Africa.

Perhaps the assumption is that, as opponents of abortion sometimes say, the aborted fetus had the genetic potential to become a Beethoven or an Einstein.

The prospect of genuine European integration on foreign affairs and defense issues was denied time and again, at each step of the successive negotiations for the Treaties of Amsterdam, Nice, the aborted constitutional project, and Lisbon.

It is in this context that the abortive Palestinian Mecca Agreement between the religious (Hamas) and the secular (Fatah) to form a national unity government for Palestine might have established a new paradigm for the future of regime change in the Arab world.