By David Pollock

We are now approaching the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, which offered Arabs and Muslims around the world a new “engagement” with the United States. A year later, how do Arab publics see the results of that effort–and how much do their views about it really matter?

One thing is very clear: compared to former President George W. Bush, Obama’s personal popularity among most Arabs started out much higher and so far has generally stayed that way. The latest available survey data on this are from Pechter Middle East Polls, a young firm based in Princeton, New Jersey that partners with the most credible established local pollsters in each country. The results …

PRINCETON, N.J., May 5 (UPI) — Only 18 percent of Iraqi Shiites surveyed have a favorable view of the Iranian role in Iraqi political affairs, a survey of 3,000 Iraqis indicated.

A poll conducted by Pechter Middle East Polls in Princeton, N.J., found that 43 percent of the Iraqi Shiites interviewed in April held a negative view of Iranian ties to their political leaders. Only 18 percent of the Shiites interviewed held a favorable view, the poll found.

Shiite Islam is the official religion of Iran while Iraq’s Muslim population is about 60 percent Shiite, Sunnis, who comprise about 35 percent of the population, ran the country while Saddam Hussein was in power.

The survey, conducted for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the …

By David Pollock and Ahmed Ali

Two months after nationwide elections, Iraq’s government formation process is still on hold. The final voting results have yet to be announced as disputes over recounts and candidate disqualifications linger. Nor is it clear how a governing majority will be formed, and power shared, among the four major party alliances, each of which garnered somewhere between 16 percent and 28 percent of the vote: the Kurdish bloc and its affiliates; the largely Sunni or secular Iraqiyah party led by a former prime minister of Shiite origin, Ayad Allawi; incumbent prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s largely Shiite State of Law Alliance (SLA); and SLA’s rival Shiite/Sadrist list, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), …