It has been some two years now since I really got into writing articles on a regular basis. How, if at all, have my perspectives changed over time?
I would say that foremost I have gradually shifted away from what is all too common in commentary on the Middle East these days: namely, polemical moralizing- an approach that does nothing to explain developments to readers but rather tackles ad nauseam the questions of who the supposed good and bad guys are, why does no one express outrage over development X but everyone frets about Y (usually a strawman), why does government A not implement policy B, and so on. What I aim for instead is analysis: that is, to try to explain events to readers and predict reasonably what might happen. The person who influenced me to adopt an analytical approach towards my writing was my friend Oskar Svadkovsky.
The second shift is in my use of sources. Most of the early articles I wrote (up to the end of June 2011) are, besides the tendency to moralize and make simplistic policy recommendations, too derivative and lacking in engagement with primary sources. Simply recycling contents from widely read English-language reports is not good enough. Accordingly, I am quite willing to disown all my writings for the site known as "American Thinker" and all articles I wrote up to the end of June 2011, except for the essays on the Aeneid and the Iliad. They are, quite frankly, a waste of bits and bytes.
NB: For further clarification, note that all other writings not put up on this site are similarly disowned.