JIME News Report

The Middle East in 2009

Roger Hardy
Middle East Analyst, BBC News
(12/22/2008)

New players will emerge onto the Middle East stage in the coming year, of whom Barack Obama is only one (albeit the most significant). Watch the following:

20 January: Barack Obama will become president, carrying on his young shoulders a heavy burden of expectation.
January: Palestinian elections – If Mahmoud Abbas goes ahead and calls parliamentary and presidential elections – as he says he will – Hamas will denounce them as illegitimate. Elections in the West Bank, and not in Gaza, will be meaningless. Abbas will not gain the legitimacy he craves.
End-January: Iraqi elections – Provincial elections in Iraq, the first for four years, will throw up new local leaders in both Shi’ite and Sunni areas. Given the country’s decentralised condition in which power is dispersed, the elections matter. The Sadr movement is not competing, but instead supporting independent candidates – hence the crucial contest is between the two other main Shi’ite factions, Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq (ISCI, formerly SCIRI) of Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim. Expect hard-fought and disorderly elections – and an outcome that does little to enhance prospects for national accord.
February: Israeli elections – The Israeli elections will be won by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, setting back hopes of reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Partly for this reason, expect the Obama administration to focus on the Syrian track and make overtures to the Asad administration in Damascus.
May: Lebanese elections – Parliamentary elections in Lebanon will indicate if the country is moving towards the West or back into the Syrian orbit. If the latter, this will strengthen President Bashar al-Asad’s hand in his dealings with Israel and the West.
12 June: Iranian elections – The presidential contest in Iran is the hardest of the elections to predict. President Ahmad-Nejad is certainly unpopular because of his mismanagement of the economy. Moreover it is possible that a high-profile reformist contender, Mohammed Khatami, will try to regain the post he held between 1997 and 2005. The picture is complicated, however, by the fact that the country’s foremost decision-maker – Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – appears to want Ahmadi-Nejad to stay on. In any event, expect a serious overture to Tehran by the Obama administration, in a bid to resolve the nuclear impasse and prevent a US-Iranian clash.

Elections will complicate the picture in 2009, but they will not be the whole story. Expect President Obama to have an uphill struggle in four key areas:

in keeping his promise to pull out combat troops from Iraq in 16 months;
in his efforts to revive the Arab-Israeli peace process;
in reaching out to Iran;
and, last but not least, in putting more troops into Afghanistan in an attempt to reverse the dangerously deteriorating situation there.

Happy New Year.