• Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• Democracy in Iraq
• The threat of Islamic revolution

In 2005 the vast majority of the issues that made the Middle East such a violence-prone region in the previous century remained unresolved. In Israel and its Occupied Territories (land Israel took from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria during the Six-Dar War in 1967), Jews and Palestinians still fight physically and verbally to determine how best to settle their long-standing dispute over the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own independent nations in the region.

In Lebanon, the withdrawal of Syrian troops in early 2005, troops which had entered Lebanon in 1975 to assist the Lebanese government during the Lebanese civil war and had remained in the country to keep peace and exert Syrian control...