Word: itely
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...April of this year, Barack Obama was taking a lot of heat for saying he'd be willing to talk to the leaders of the Shi'ite nation of Iran. Yet at the same time, the head of another theocratic state - one whose agents in this country had committed devastating crimes against hundreds of thousands of young Americans - came to the U.S. and received a warm welcome from President Bush, the national press and most of the American people. He even got to say Mass before a sold-out crowd at Yankee Stadium...
...What we tend to ignore is why Syria has had an uninterrupted record of attaching itself to radical causes and countries like Iran. For starters, Syria is ruled by a besieged and insecure minority, the Alawites, a heterodox-Shi'ite ethnic minority. About 12% of Syria's population, the Alawites are looked at by extremist Sunni Muslims as heretics, fallen-away Muslims, usurpers who should be put to the sword. In the late '70s and early '80s, the Sunni extremists came close to getting their way. During a February 1982 Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Hama, Syria's third largest city...
...Iraqi army proved to be a key strategic blunder that gave a massive boost to the insurgency. This week the U.S. will try again, transferring control of 54,000 of the 100,000-strong largely Sunni citizen patrols known as the Sons of Iraq (SOI) to a Shi'ite-led government many of them view with suspicion. The rest will remain on the U.S payroll, as part of a phased transfer...
...Obviously this is an internal division among Muslims. The case of Iraq is a particularly important one because Iraq is a country that has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni domination. I would borrow a word from the Irish history to describe it and say it's the "Shi'ite Ascendancy." Since the days of the medieval Caliphate, the Sunnis remained the ruling group. They monopolized all of the positions of power and authority. Now, for the first time, the Shi'ite has access to power as they must inevitably in any real democracy, and so far its going...
...specter of renewed sectarian strife is also very real: a tenuous truce between Iraq's various communities will be tested early next month, when the U.S. transfers command authority over the so-called Awakening or Sahwa councils (the Sunni tribal groups that fought al-Qaeda) to the predominantly Shi'ite central government. Neither side trusts the other. Tensions between Arabs and Kurds are also on the rise in several northern districts of Iraq, as well as between al-Maliki and his Kurdish coalition partners in Baghdad. Provincial elections are to be held by the end of this year, but they...