Word: ites
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...failed to intimidate Mousavi and his supporters. But while it would almost certainly empty the streets, the "nuclear option" of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown would be a potentially fatal injury to the regime's sources of legitimacy: its limited but lively democracy and the backing of Shi'ite clergy. Discord among the mullahs is growing, with some senior clerics, like the esteemed house-arrested dissident Ayatullah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, publicly condemning Khamenei's handling of the election and warning ordinary soldiers and police officers that they would "answer to God" for any violence against the people. A crackdown would...
...Earlier this week, I received an e-mail from a Lebanese who was present at the creation of the country's Iranian-backed, Shi'ite militia Hizballah in 1982 and on familiar terms with its most radical and violent members. He wrote: "Are you people crazy backing Mousavi, a patron of Hizballah's terrorist wing?" (See behind-the-scenes pictures of Mir-Hossein Mousavi...
...scrutinized: To what extent did British concerns about the dangers of American unilateralism trump competing fears about the reliability of intelligence and risk of rupturing European relations? How much effort went into postwar planning? Why did Britain continue to reduce its forces in Basra even as the Shi'ite insurgency gained pace...
President Jalal Talabani on Sunday congratulated Ahmadinejad on his re-election. There were congratulatory messages, too, from top Shi'ite leaders Abdel Aziz al-Hakim and Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim is in Tehran, receiving treatment for cancer, and Sadr is believed to be training to become an ayatullah in the Iranian holy city...
...brought on the Islamic Republic, Iran has been governed by a power structure that combines unelected clerics with an elected legislature and presidency. Under the revolution's principle of velayat e-faqi or "guardianship of the jurisprudent," ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the Shi'ite clergy, first among them the Supreme Leader, chosen by an unelected Assembly of Experts. Still, the regime always sought to affirm its legitimacy through holding elections for parliament and the president...