The Year That Was/The Year That's Coming

As Husni Mubarak leads the way for Obama and the rest of us into 2011, let's glance back at the key points of 2010, the year in which Al-Ahram taught us with the above photo what an "expressive" photo was: what we'd previously thought of as "faked."

They had an "expressive" election, too.

The historian in me resists doing the "biggest story of 2010" sort of wrap-up, since I think you need longer perspective to know what really mattered, They say that when China's Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion of the French Revolution, he said "It's too soon to tell." A useful perspective.

Brian Whitaker chose Tunisia. The Jerusalem Post suggests Stuxnet. Either might turn out to be true, or as evanescent as all the stories you've forgotten about from last winter. Both are pretty recent. The simmering tensions in Lebanon over the STL could blow both off our radar screens in 2011,or might themselves prove overblown.

I do have a candidate for silliest story of the year: the Miss USA is a Hizbullah mole story that riled the far right briefly, until they focused on the "Ground Zero Mosque" that isn't a mosaue and isn't at Ground Zero.

Looking ahead, certainly one of the big stories of 2011 will be which Mubarak Egyptians will be asked to vote for in the fall. The illnesses of senior Saudis may be moving us towards a major transition there, too.

But the one looming story that I've shied away from could be the real bombshell lurking in the wings: the January 9 referendum on independenced in southern Sudan. The secession of southern Sudan — which seems inevitable unless they have Egyptian or Tunisian election observers — is going to shake the region and the Arab world. There's an African precedent (Eritrea from Ethiopia) but not an Arab one, and Egypt is concerned about the Nile. This is the powder keg no one wants to notice even as the fuse burns. Let's hope everyone's really going to respect the results. You believe that, don't you?

Yeah, me neither. Happy New Year.

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