Iranian politics increasingly resembles a brutal game of musical chairs.

Last month, two former senior politicians who ran against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 disappeared into political detention. On Tuesday, March 8, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- a former president and for three decades one of Iran's most powerful politicians -- lost his post as head of the Assembly of Experts, the body of clerics that theoretically supervises the Supreme Leader of Iran and chooses his successor.

Rafsanjani's replacement by Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, an elderly conservative who is bound to a wheelchair, is the culmination of a slow-moving purge by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, ironically, acquired the top job at Rafsanjani's instigation in 1989. The apparent intent is to strip other Iranian institutions of any authority, further demoralize Iran's opposition Green Movement, and prove that the Arab uprisings of the past two months will stop at the border with Iran.

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Somewhat lost in the wave of protests sweeping through the Middle East, which are now washing up on Iraq's shores, has been the recent deployment of two brigades of Kurdish peshmerga troops in the disputed province of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. There has been a peshmerga presence in Kirkuk since 2003, but stationed north of the provincial capital of Kirkuk city. However, following Iraq's own "Day of Rage" on Feb. 25, peshmerga forces moved to take up positions along a line south of the city. Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials have stated that the deployment is needed to protect Kurdish populations in the disputed areas from the threat posed by what they claim are terrorist-infiltrated demonstrations. The Iraqi government's response to the move has so far been muted, but local Arab leaders in Kirkuk and some of their Turkoman counterparts are expressing alarm that the move will fuel intercommunal tension and requesting intervention by the national government. Underscoring the potential seriousness of the situation, on Sunday, U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey and U.S. Forces Commanding General Lloyd Austin met with KRG President Massoud Barzani to discuss security arrangements in Kirkuk.

The status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories in northern Iraq is perhaps the major unresolved potential political driver of conflict in Iraq as American troops prepare to withdraw later this year, and at various points since 2008 the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish peshmerga have come close to an armed confrontation. The current situation in Kirkuk is likely to be defused without further escalation, but it raises important questions about the consolidation of U.S.-backed conflict-prevention mechanisms aimed at forestalling the use of military units to resolve territorial disputes as well as the lack of a viable Iraqi political process to begin to resolve the core elements underlying the territorial conflict. Without any political road map or vision existing for addressing the fate of the disputed territories, there is the risk that parties are tempted to take matters into their own hands and that moments of social unrest, such as the current demonstrations around poor services and unemployment, quickly degenerate into ethnic tension.

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What Egyptians have termed their "revolution" is now beginning to look like one. Seen from afar, it appears that the military rulers have struggled successfully to hold most state institutions intact and slow the pace of change, but the Egyptian political order is still being fundamentally rewritten. The core constitutional demands of a diverse opposition -- for freer and more democratic politics -- are not being silenced or diverted.

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Iran is the largest nation-state supporter of armed resistance to Israel's occupation, a country whose current leadership justifies seemingly provocative actions in the Middle East as countermeasures to Israeli-American expansionism. As popular revolutions designed at securing freedom and throwing off the domination of authoritarian rulers, many of which are U.S. clients, Iran has expressed an official foreign policy that purports to stand with a self-determined Middle East, directed by the will of its people.

So why is the largest national patron of the Palestinian struggle and self-proclaimed ally of Arab world liberation jailing American solidarity activists who shine a light on the systematic Israeli abuse of Palestinians?

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As a longtime advisor to Saif al-Qaddafi, Benjamin Barber knows him just about as well as any Western intellectual. Barber -- president of the CivWorld think tank, distinguished senior fellow at the Demos think tank, and author of Strong Democracy and Jihad vs. McWorld -- was among a small group of democracy advocates and public intellectuals, including Joseph Nye, Anthony Giddens, Francis Fukuyama, and Robert Putnam, working under contract with the Monitor Group consulting firm to interact with Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi on issues of democracy and civil society and to help his son Saif implement democratic reforms and author a more representative constitution for Libya. It's all gone horribly wrong. But in this interview, Barber argues that his intentions were responsible, tries to understand Saif's remarkable about-face, and worries for the future of Libya and the young man he knew well.

Foreign Policy: How is it that so many people got Saif al-Qaddafi so wrong?

Benjamin Barber: Who got it wrong? I don't think anyone got him wrong. Is that the idea: to go back and say in 2006, 2007, 2008, when the U.S. recognized the government of Muammar al-Qaddafi, when the sovereign oil fund that Libya set up and that people like Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson, or organizations like the Carlyle Group and Blackstone, were doing business with, and the heavy investments oil companies were making while others were running around and making all sorts of money -- that those of us who went in trying to do some work for democratic reform, that we somehow got Saif wrong?

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CAIRO — While the world turns its attention to the riveting drama in Libya, where revolutionaries are seeking to oust the dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, the revolution next door in Egypt is entering a new phase -- one that is just as exhilarating and consequential as the protests that drove President Hosni Mubarak from power in just 18 incredible days.

In fact, the revolution may be gaining momentum. The Egyptian people endured Mubarak's reign for 30 years, but 33 days of Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq was all it took for them to threaten to take to the streets en masse to demand his ouster. Shafiq, who was appointed by Mubarak during the early days of the revolution in a blatant bid to seem reasonable without conceding much power, was widely seen, along with much of his cabinet, as a relic of the pre-revolutionary era and the man who had overseen -- or at least failed to stop -- some of the most violent attacks against peaceful demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

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Israelis, like most Jews, worry for a living. The dark side of Jewish history and the security challenges of their national life compel them to. And these days there's plenty to worry about. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and turbulent changes in the Arab world unleashed by the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia are shifting the power balance against Israel. Indeed, its position in the neighborhood -- in part as a consequence of its own policies -- is growing increasingly precarious.

But Israel, and particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is also worried about something else: How will their close ally in Washington, particularly President Barack Obama, react to this tumultuous Arab Spring. Will he race to coddle and court the new Arab democrats, doing so at Israel's expense? Is a big American peace initiative coming, one designed to pre-empt further radicalization in the region that will require big concessions from Israel?

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Last week, Israel closed its principal trade terminal with the 1.8 million people of the Gaza Strip. Karni's closing hardly merited the attention of an international or indeed a Middle East audience captivated by the popular revolts now convulsing the Arab world. But thanks to this Arab awakening, Israel's long-planned action poses an important test to the newfound power of Arab and particularly Egyptian public opinion to chart a new course in relations with the Palestinians, Hamas, and Israel.

For more than two decades after its conquest of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in June 1967, Israel did all in its power to erase trade and physical barriers between it and the Palestinian territories it was occupying. The territories offered Israel a captive market (literally) and a source of cheap labor. In 1982, then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon even removed the two bored soldiers whose sleepy presence marked the old and seemingly redundant border with Gaza.

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