The January 2003 Israeli elections for the 16th Knesset marked the resurgence of the Likud Party and an electoral disaster for Labor. The elections also marked a return to the old system under which the Prime Minister is chosen from the dominant party rather than elected directly, as had been the case in recent elections. The 2003 vote came in the midst of continuing confrontations with the Palestinian Authority and followed the special election of 2001 in which Ariel Sharon had been chosen as Prime Minister. The article analyzes the 2003 results and their implications for Israeli politics.

This article examines the performance of political parties in postwar Lebanon against the benchmark of parties in the prewar period. Parties turned into militias during Lebanon's fifteen-year war and reverted to their party status with the ending of the war in 1990. In postwar Lebanon parties face several problems partly generated by their inability to recover from wartime practices and partly because of the built-in limitations in the political system inhibiting competitive politics.

Hundreds of recently declassified documents now reveal details of the complex negotiations leading to Iranian occupation of Abu Musa Island and outright invasion of the two Tunbs islands in 1971. Whitehall was so concerned about the prospects of invasion that it quickly fashioned contingency plans to defend the islands. The British undertook fourteen months of complex shuttle diplomacy to resolve the dispute and introduced many formulae to satisfy the conflicting demands of Iran, Ras Al Khaimah, and Sharjah.

In post-Saddam Husayn Iraq, Shi'ite militias rapidly established their authority in East Baghdad and other urban neighborhoods of the south. Among the various groups which emerged, the Sadr Movement stands out as militant and cohesive. The sectarian, anti-American Sadrists wish to impose a puritanical, Khomeinist vision on Iraq. Their political influence is potentially much greater than their numbers. Incorporating them into a democratic Iraq while ensuring that they do not come to dominate it poses a severe challenge to the US Administration.

For many in the Bush Administration Iraq is now the test case for whether the US can create, through introducing a series of neoliberal economic reforms, a system of American-style free market capitalism in the Arab world. The neoliberal model as applied to Iraq's economic transformation will entail a policy mix stressing a greater role for the market in the allocation of resources, a much reduced role for the state, and increasing integration in the world economy.