The conventional wisdom when looking at the Middle East is to assume that Israel because of its military might has the strongest hand in future negotiations. However in reality, Israel faces significant security challenges which go to the heart of the Jewish state’s viability. However the author believes these challenges are virtually insurmountable.

The US-staged Iraqi election on January 30th 2005 was heralded a success with some 8.5 million or 58% of eligible voters casting votes to elect the 275 member Transitional National Assembly. It was widely reported that, despite the insurgency, Shiites and Kurds turned out in great numbers to vote and the election returned a resounding victory to Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s Party, the Shiite Alliance, which won 48.1% of the vote, followed by the Kurdish Alliance (25.7%) and Ayad Allawi’s grouping, the Iraqi List Party (13.8%). The US was clearly jubilant about the success of the plebiscite, which was depicted as a watershed event and a triumph for the establishment of democracy in Iraq. However, amid the self-congratulation over the apparent success of the elections, the Sunni electoral boycott in cities such as Ramadi, Mosul, and Fallujah was ignored. The comprehensiveness of the election boycott indicates that the insurgents now command the loyalty of the majority of the Sunnis, who represent some 40% of the population.ⁱ

"To speak of the Shi’a of the Arab world is to raise a sensitive issue that most Muslims would rather not discuss,” is the opening gambit of the authors of “The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten Muslims”. Graham Fuller, resident senior political consultant at the RAND Corporation, and Rend Rahim Francke, executive director of the Iraq Foundation and later the Iraqi Governing Council’s US representative, go on to say, “Sunnis by and large prefer to avoid the subject, and even many Shi’a are uncomfortable with it.” If western commentators are to be believed however, the story of the Shi’a and Sunni is not simply one of an awkward relationship. They represent ‘Islam’s great schism’, one that renders the idea of a homogenous Muslim collective - the Ummah - a myth: “The Shi’a…present a sensitive problem that assails to the core of Muslim unity and undermines the traditional histiography of the Muslim state…” or so Fuller and Francke believe. The concept of a universal Islamic political system, one capable of ruling over both Shi’a and Sunni, is considered a similar figment of Islamist utopia. The Library Journal’s review of Olivier Roy’s mid-nineties book, ‘The Failure of Political Islam’ declares, “…the attempt to create a universal Islamist state is doomed to failure because of the conflicts between Sunni and Shi’a forms and other ethnic differences in the Islamic world…”¹

Weapons of Mass Destruction have shaped the post 9-11 debate with respect to international peace and security. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, weapons proliferation continues to occur in countries such as North Korea. However it is Iranian policy and nuclear intentions which is now the central focus of western foreign policy. Sajjad Khan argues that the nuclear bargain explicit within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty has now broken down. If nuclear nations are not going to disarm their own arsenals, then there exists very good security reasons why Iran should not forsake her own program. The author also argues that western ‘democracies’ claim to greater legitimacy in their justification for holding WMD’s needs also to be questioned.