■"Syria's Voices of Change: Ruling Party Reformers, Emboldened Dissidents Debate Their Nation's Destiny, Despite Dangers," by Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, 25 May 2005, p. A1.

■"Protesters Attacked in Cairo: On Voting Day, Pro-Mubarak Mobs Beat Dissenters," by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 26 May 2005, p. A1.

Two good examples of why we need to be both patient and realistic about the pace of political change in the Middle East. It's dangerous to stand up for pluralism in these regimes. You take your life in your hands when you open your mouth.

Here's the opening paras from the Shadid piece:

Ayman Abdel Nour's contest with censorship began with a term not uncommon in Syria: "forbidden."

Last spring, the word appeared on the screen of his Compaq computer, barring him entry to his Web site, all4syria.org. His computer was the problem, he thought at first. Perhaps the server was down. Then he realized the government had blocked his site -- a forum for unprecedented dialogue among groups, parties and thinkers in Syria -- nearly a year after he had inaugurated it.

Abdel Nour, a 40-year-old reformer from within the ruling Baath Party, lost little time.

The same day, he collected the e-mail addresses he had -- 1,700 in all -- and dispatched his daily update. Two days later, the government blocked e-mails from that address from entering the Syrian network. The next day, he changed the address and transmitted another bulletin. Then that address was shut down. Changed again, and blocked. And so it went for nearly a month and a half -- Abdel Nour devising new addresses, the government barring them -- until the censors finally gave up.

"I was always ahead of them," said Abdel Nour, a kinetic multi-tasker fond of reading e-mail, holding a conversation and answering a cell phone at the same time. "They couldn't read my mind. They couldn't ban the addresses in advance."

Since then, Abdel Nour's e-mail list has grown to 15,200 subscribers, including secular and religious dissidents, intellectuals, businessmen, party leaders, ministers and Syrian embassies. Through its content and as a symbol, the bulletin has emerged as a crucial interlocutor in the tentative, precarious space permitted to dissent in a country where nearly everyone suspects that change is ahead, even if they clash over the shape and direction it might take.

What guys like Nour are doing is nothing less dangerous or admirable than what Soviet dissidents did for years. We lionized them and justly so. We need to be similarly impressed and supportive of such efforts in the Middle East becauseóas recent events in Cairo showóit's a great way to get your head split open if you're not careful, and sometimes even when you are.