Word: blocs
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...idea of detaching Maliki from his own political base already seemed more than a little implausible. And as he left Baghdad for the meeting, Maliki's key coalition partner, the parliamentary bloc headed by the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Sadr, announced that it would suspend participation in the government, potentially leaving the Prime Minister's parliamentary majority in doubt. Last weekend, Sadr had warned that he would withdraw support for Maliki if the Prime Minister took the meeting with Bush in Jordan. But while Sadr appears to have told Maliki to choose him or choose the U.S., the Hadley...
...Mahdi Army. U.S. officials began to describe Abu Deraa as a "rogue militia leader" and a "free agent" no longer in al-Sadr's control. But some of al-Sadr's associates continue to praise Abu Deraa. Falah Shansal, a member of parliament from the al-Sadr bloc, told TIME last week that Abu Deraa was still "a fighter in the Mahdi Army...
...precautions. Some spend most of their time in well-protected homes surrounded by sealed-off streets; others rely on armed bodyguards or have switched smoked-glass limousines for nondescript vehicles or armor-plated SUVs. Mosbah Ahdab, a Sunni legislator from Tripoli and a member of the anti-Syrian parliamentary bloc, has lived under the threat of assassination for more than two years. "I take precautions," he says in an interview with TIME. "We have so many people calling us all the time saying be careful, not to be loud...
...problem that arises when people hop into a political box and sit there for decades at a time is that they unwittingly disenfranchise themselves. Armed with the knowledge that their religious, racial, or sexual orientation group is a huge bloc that will generally vote together, voters pigeonhole themselves, foolishly thinking that doing so is an effective way to influence an election. But if it’s a forgone conclusion which way a given demographic will vote, neither party has any incentive to work in any meaningful way to keep the voters they already have. After all, if the Republicans...
...Wolf also turned many Western German spies into double agents. One, code-named "Topaz," worked for more than two decades in NATO's headquarters. Wolf personally ran the highest-ranking woman in the West German intelligence service, the deputy head of its Soviet bloc division, whose reports were so good they regularly reached the desks of the head of the KGB in Moscow. Even the head of West German counterintelligence defected to Wolf. "As even my bitter foes would acknowledge," he wrote in his interesting but fundamentally unrevealing 1997 memoir The Man Without A Face, his spy agency "was probably...