Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thick Persian accent. (Sistan-Baluchestan is the name of a province in southeastern Iran.) Meanwhile, across the border, Iran's top judge, Ayatullah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, struggles with Persian, the residue of an Iraqi birth. Theological cross-pollination and political exile have created deep ties between the two Shi'ite communities--and that's exactly what the U.S. is afraid of. In his speech last week announcing plans to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, President Bush warned that if the U.S. left, "Iran would be emboldened." Hours later, U.S. troops raided an Iranian office in Iraq...
...Administration should relax. Iraq poses big problems, but becoming Iran's flunky probably isn't one of them. There are three main reasons: Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds...
Sunni Iraqis have feared Persian domination since before there was an Iraq. That fear reached fever pitch after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Sunni politicians regularly call their Shi'ite rivals tools of Tehran. If Iraq's Shi'ite leaders want the Sunnis to end their insurgency, they'll have to seriously distance themselves from the mullahs next door. If they don't, the Baghdad government will lack influence over large chunks of the country, since even with Iran's help, Iraq's Shi'ite militias won't easily defeat a Sunni insurgency stocked with Saddam's former officers...
...could dismember Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'ite militia, a positive domino effect would follow. President Bush should tell Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that unless he lets us crush al-Sadr's forces, we'll pull out. Iraq is the strangest war the U.S. has ever fought, in the sense that the Iraqis seem to hate one another more than they hate...
...asking whether it makes any sense to send more troops to Iraq, you should have asked whether it made sense to send troops in the first place. Even a complete idiot could see that the removal of Saddam Hussein would give rise to civil war and a bloody Shi'ite takeover. We have wasted more than $350 billion, lost another war, caused more than 50,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, reduced the country to anarchy and incurred the hatred of much of the world. And now we're proposing to continue on this insane course...