Summary: There were many domestic reasons voters handed an American-backed coalition a victory over a Hezbollah-led coalition in Lebanese parliamentary elections, but political analysts also attribute it in part to President Barack Obama’s campaign of outreach to the Arab and Muslim world.

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Summary: By actually putting into practice the Neo-Conservative theories of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, George W. Bush demonstrated their failure more persuasively than could the most articulate progressive critic.

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Summary: Iranian demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Obama,” burned photographs of Barack Obama in Tehran as they protested against America’s inaction over Israel’s Gaza offensive. Iranian demonstrators have often burned effigies or pictures of U.S. presidents, but this appeared to be the first time Obama’s picture had been defaced, a week before his inauguration as president.

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Summary: President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel in 2008 to help it raid Iran’s main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, according to the New York Times.

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Summary: A female suicide bomber killed at least 38 and wounded 72 in an attack on pilgrims entering the revered Imam Moussa al-Kadhim shrine in Kadhimiya, northwestern Baghdad, on January 4, 2009. … Security incidents in Iraq on Jan. 3, 2009, as reported by Reuters. … January 2008 update of key facts, figures, and statistics on Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

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Iraq’s fractious parliament squeezed its abrasive speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani out of a job and authorized non-U.S. foreign troops to stay in the country for another half-year, a pair of high-stakes moves in its final session of 2008.

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Summary: Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, says Iraq will need a U.S. troop presence for 10 years to help build up its military forces, well past the newly agreed three-year deadline for the withdrawal of American soldiers under the U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement negotiated by the Bush administration.

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Summary: Al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said in an Internet video the U.S. financial crisis was caused by Washington’s military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and taxpayers were paying the price. … Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has emerged as a nationalist strongman after reaching a status-of-forces agreement with the Bush administration requiring U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

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Summary: Iran praised the Iraqi Cabinet for approving a U.S-Iraq status-of-forces agreement. … Michael Hanna, an analyst at the Century Foundation in New York, said a continuing but finite presence of U.S. troops in Iraq could benefit Iran because it provides “retaliatory options” as Tehran pursues a nuclear program opposed by the West.

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Summary: In Mosul, an Iraqi soldier fired automatic weapons at U.S. soldiers at a military base, killing two and wounding six before he died in a hail of bullets. … In Baghdad, bombers struck the capital for a third straight day, killing 23 people and wounding scores in a string of attacks in mostly Shiite areas. … In Kandahar, Afghanistan, a suicide bomber driving an oil tanker detonated his explosives outside an Afghan government office during a provincial council meeting, killing at least six people and wounding 42. … Iran test-fired a solid-fuel, high-speed Sajjil long-range surface-to-surface missile with a range of about 1,200 miles. … North Korea announced it will shut the country’s border with the South on Dec. 1, 2008.

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