World in Conflict

On the morning of June 28, 2009, Honduran soldiers arrested President Manuel Zelaya in his pajamas and promptly sent him on a plane to Costa Rica. The leftist Latin American leader was quick to call his arrest and expulsion a coup, but unlike coups beforehand control of Honduras did not rest with the military. The speaker of the Honduran National Congress and a member of Zelaya's own Liberal Party, Roberto Micheletti, was quickly sworn in as interim leader as called for in the order of succession. And though the plan was to ride out the storm until planned presidential elections on Nov. 29, 2009, global condemnation came crashing down on the Central American nation -- even from the United States.

The bloody history of Hutu and Tutsi conflict stained the 20th century, from the slaughter of 80,000 to 200,000 Hutus by the Tutsi army in Burundi in 1972 to the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which Hutu militias targeted Tutsis, resulting in a 100-day death toll between 800,000 and 1 million. But many observers would be surprised to learn that the longstanding conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi has nothing to do with language or religion, and many geneticists have been hard-pressed to find marked ethnic differences between the two.

In a 1991-92 war with Georgia, the breakaway republic declared independence with their capital as Tskhinvali, though the region has not been recognized as a nation by any country in the United Nations. The purpose of breaking away is seen as a desire to unify with ethnic brethren in North Ossetia Alania, which is part of the Russian Federation. In the time since, Georgia has protested Russia's role as a peacekeeping force in the region, saying it's not a neutral party in the conflict. About 70 percent of the region's inhabitants have been furnished with Russian citizenship, and more than half of its budget comes from Russia.

For starters, the two-state solution is a three-state solution at this point: Fatah and Hamas violently split in 2007, with Fatah supporters being thrown from tall buildings in Gaza and corresponding retaliation. The West Bank is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas. This is the only government that the West and Israel deal with. Hamas controls Gaza and is adamantly opposed to existing peace proposals with Israel, and continues to attempt to plunge farther into Israeli territory by launching rocket attacks into the Jewish state.

President Barack Obama made outreach to the Islamic Republic a cornerstone of his foreign policy, but it may not work out as planned. The purpose of bringing Iran to the table is intended to defuse concerns about the intentions of the country's nuclear program, which Tehran claims is for peaceful nuclear energy purposes but which many others throughout the international community fear could be used for nuclear weapons. And it isn't just the West and Israel -- the target of numerous threats from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- concerned about the military power of Iran: Saudi Arabia is extremely concerned about Iran's growing power in the Middle East, and its impact on Shiite power as a whole.

As we neared the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, yet another mass grave was discovered in a country that is pocked with crude burial sites dating back to Saddam Hussein's Baathist rule that began in 1979. That grave -- the largest yet in Diyala province -- was discovered March 7, 2008, near an orchard, and contains the remains of about 100 people, the decomposition initially suggesting that they had been there for some time. Unfortunately, the discovery was nothing new.