Word: shied
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...Like most elections, Iraq's is in part a referendum on the incumbent, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is running on his record of bringing security and normal life back to Iraq. Originally chosen as a compromise candidate by rival Shi'ite leaders who expected him to be a weak prime minister, he surprised the country by consolidating power, reaching out beyond his Shi'ite base and embracing the cause of national unity. Still, Maliki's State of Law coalition has significant weaknesses. Though untouched by scandal himself, the Iraqi government is notoriously corrupt, and voters remain unhappy about...
...reconciliation process clearly still has a long way to go. A number of times during al-Maliki's conciliatory speech, the crowd expressed its enthusiasm in an unabashedly sectarian vocabulary. "We are with you, Ali!" they chanted, referring to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Shi'ites believe was cheated out of the leadership of the community of the faithful more than 1,000 years ago in the original schism with the Sunnis. (See pictures of Iraqis preparing to vote...
...surface, there is a new spirit of national unity. All the political coalitions contesting Sunday's election have at least some semblance of sectarian diversity. Even the most homogeneous of the big blocs pretend to be more diverse than they really are. For example, the Shi'ite Islamist bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, which critics suspect would like to spin off oil-rich Shi'ite southern Iraq into an autonomous region, includes one Sunni party from Anbar province. When asked, many average Iraqis say sectarian violence was something forced on them by outsiders, a bad dream from which they...
...Indeed, Iraq's politicians still play the sectarian card when it suits them. Last month, the Justice and Accountability Commission, a secretive government de-Baathification committee headed by prominent Shi'ite politicians, banned some 500 candidates - most of them Sunni and secular - from running in the parliamentary election, without ever showing any evidence that linked them to the Baath party. Some critics saw the move as a last-minute attempt by al-Maliki's campaign, which had also been running campaign ads showing Saddam-era atrocities against Shi'ites, to reconnect with the Shi'ite political base. The move raised...
...That change may also be caused by shifts in the sectarian fault lines. Instead of Shi'ite-vs.-Sunni conflict, tensions now are mounting inside ethnic and sectarian groups. The duopolistic ruling parties of Iraqi Kurdistan find themselves under threat from a breakaway movement - Goran, or "change" - more interested in cleaning up politics in the Kurdistan Regional Government than in accelerating Kurdish autonomy from the rest of Iraq. And there's been plenty of bad blood between al-Maliki and the fundamentalist Shi'ite parties of the Iraqi National Alliance ever since the Prime Minister sent the army...