Word: itely
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...while making it clear that U.S. patience has limits. But no sooner had the U.S. made this declaration than Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki virtually dismissed it. Not only did he reject the notion of timelines, but he scolded the U.S. for attacking commanders of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army in Baghdad. TIME.com asked Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, one of America's foremost experts on Shi'ite politics and culture in Iran and beyond, to explain why Maliki and the U.S. can't seem to stay on the same page...
...also has a serious policy dispute with the U.S., and a sense of betrayal. They promised him, last summer when they launched the major security offensive to retake Baghdad, that the U.S. would take care of Sunni guerrilla movement in Baghdad before moving against Mahdi Army [the Shi'ite militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose stronghold is in Baghdad]. That way, Maliki could to go to the Shi'ite elders in Baghdad and say, you are safe, you no longer need militias and they are a source of discord, so they must be disbanded. But the Americans failed to dislodge...
...Maliki's outrage over attacks on the Mahdi Army are not a matter of principle; it's about the fact that the U.S. hasn't first done what it said it would do, which was to eliminate the threat of the Sunni insurgents in Baghdad. The reason Shi'ite communities believe they need militias is to protect them from the Sunni guerrillas, which they say the government and the U.S. are not doing. And Maliki can't go and tell them to get rid of their militias while they remain vulnerable to attack by Sunni guerrillas...
...also worth remembering that Shi'ite politicians commanding militias are not following a Western political model in which participating in government at the same time as maintaining a private militia is unthinkable. The only country in the region with which they're familiar that has elections, a parliament, a president and so on, is Iran. And many of the institutions in Iran, since the revolution, have a dual character. So Hakim and Sadr think of their militias as analogous to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which exist as a paramilitary institution separate from and not entirely integrated with the regular military...
...that Iran is being unhelpful or is somehow helping the Sunni insurgency has no basis in reality. Tehran does not want Iraq to break up: They're as worried as Turkey is about the Kurds becoming independent. They want a united Iraq, a democratic Iraq in which the Shi'ites' majority makes itself felt. They obviously want their preferred Shi'ite leaders, such as Maliki and Hakim, to be in power, rather than, for example, a former Baathist Shi'ite such as Iyad Allawi [the former prime minister installed by the U.S.], or Moqtada Sadr, who is viewed by Iran...