Another year Another conflict

If there is one abiding image that symbolized the horrors of the Middle East in 2004, it had to be the harrowing videotaped pictures of doomed hostages in Iraq. The shots of terrified captives pleading for their lives are the antithesis of the optimism expressed by American officials at the beginning of the year that Iraq would become stable with the formal termination of the United States-led occupation in June and creation of an interim Iraqi government. Like other key areas of conflict in the Middle East in 2004, Iraq has dashed even the frailest of expectations. At the beginning of the year, the Road Map unveiled in Spring 2003 by President George W. Bush was still considered a viable means of charting a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the continued violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Libya announced it was abandoning its weapons of mass destruction