Word: patronize
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...From the beginning, al-Sadr has made common cause with anyone fighting the occupation. (In 2004, when U.S. troops were battling Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, al-Sadr sent them aid.) Americans worried during the Vietnam War that if we left, Hanoi would become a puppet of its wartime patron, Beijing. Instead, four years after the U.S. evacuated Saigon, Vietnam and China were at war. When American troops are on your doorstep, it's easy to make common cause. But when they leave, deep-seated rivalries often re-emerge. Our occupation of Iraq helps Iran pose as the patron of Iraqi...
...Watanabe is becoming something of a patron saint of cinematic lost causes. In The Last Samurai, the Japanese actor played the title role as a doomed warrior with nothing left but his honor. He's at it again in his new film, this time as a World War II Japanese officer mounting a last stand against American troops in the critically acclaimed Letters From Iwo Jima. Watanabe, 47, spoke with Time's Michiko Toyama about his role, what it was like working with director Clint Eastwood, and the challenges of being true to the horrors...
...efforts to either detach Maliki from his key patron - Sadr, whose militia is in the thick of much of the sectarian violence - or else persuade Shi'ite rivals such as Abdulaziz al-Hakim to form a new coalition with the Sunnis and Kurds, excluding Maliki and Sadr, appear to be floundering. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme Shi'ite spiritual leader whose expressed will neither Maliki nor Hakim can cross, has made clear that he will not tolerate any moves that break the unity of the ruling Shi'ite coalition that includes Maliki, Hakim and Sadr...
...banking sanctions and other issues extraneous to the nuclear standoff - vastly complicates the art of the deal in Beijing. But the fact that both parties are at the table suggests that neither has a good alternative to the search for a compromise: China, North Korea's key patron, has left Pyongyang in no doubt that its own economic interests and those of its most benign neighbors demand that it take the path toward denuclearization and easing tensions with the U.S. At the same time, with China and South Korea resolutely opposed to cranking up the sort of pressure that would...
China has the most difficult task of all the participants in the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program that begin Monday in Beijing. As the chief patron of the North Korean regime - China supplies up to half the country's food requirement and even more of its daily oil needs - Beijing has long been seen as the only party with any real influence over the actions of the erratic Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. But Kim gave his backers in Beijing a rude surprise on October 9, when North Korea announced that it had tested a nuclear...