Word: itely
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...most significant challenge facing the U.S. in an increasingly unstable Middle East today is understanding the rise of the Shi'ites across the region. The U.S. invasion of Iraq unleashed a process of Shi'ite empowerment that won't be confined to that country: From Lebanon to the Persian Gulf, through peaceful elections and bloody conflicts, the Shi'ites are making their presence felt. The headlines of 2006 have been dominated by the likes of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army as sectarian warfare surged in Iraq; by Hizballah, emboldened by its summer war with Israel...
...When the U.S. destroyed the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, parties based in the Shi'ite majority - brutally suppressed for decades - were quick to stake their claim to the shape country's future. They embraced the American promise of democracy and, ordered to vote by their most respected spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they turned out in their millions at the polling booths to elect the Arab-world's first Shi'ite government. And that inspired Shi'ites across the region to clamor for more rights and influence, challenging centuries-old arrangements that had kept them...
...There has always been a political dimension to the Sunni-Shi'ite split, which originated in a seventh century dispute over who would succeed the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of Islam's faithful. Over time, the two sects developed their own distinct conception of Islamic teachings and practice, much as Catholicism and Protestantism did in the centuries following their split. Shiites are a minority of 10%-15% of the global Muslim community, but in the geographic arc that runs from Lebanon to Pakistan, they are around half of the Muslim population - some 150 million people in all. They account...
...change in Shi'ite fortunes has been resisted by Sunnis, nowhere more violently than Iraq, where the insurgency that continues to rage unchecked is as anti-American as it is aimed at intimidating Shi'ites who were perceived as U.S. collaborators. For two years Shi'ites showed remarkable restraint in the face of repeated provocations in the form of bloody terror attacks by Sunni insurgents, but the ferocity of those attacks eventually took its toll. And the Shi'ites did not take kindly to the U.S. strategy of wooing reluctant Sunni politicians to join the political process, which they took...
...sectarian conflict in Iraq has implications for the whole Middle East. Long before Americans recognized sectarianism as a problem it was already shaping attitudes beyond Iraq's borders. Not long after Saddam fell from power, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of an emerging Shi'ite crescent stretching from Beirut to Tehran - emerging Shi'ite power and Sunni reaction to it was on everyone's mind in the region...