Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...center disappears, and normal people acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists." In other words, if you're a resident of Baghdad, the most rational response is to seek protection from one of the militias-al-Qaeda if you're Sunni, the Mahdi Army if you're Shi'ite-or to get out of town. "It's impossible to get your teeth fixed in Baghdad," a U.S. intelligence official told me recently. "All the dentists have left the country...
...Iraq, after all, is already awash with weapons and fighters. And even the extent to which the Shi'ite political leadership is able to restrain the militias on the streets is an open question. Despite the best efforts of various, contending regional powers to shape events in Iraq, the escalating violence puts the momentum in the hands of Iraq's own contending factions. And their prospects for agreeing to a formula that can reverse the slide into full-scale civil war are not bright...
Iran is smuggling weapons through Syria to rearm Lebanese allies Hizballah, despite renewed efforts by United Nations peacekeepers and the Lebanese army to seal off the mountain borders with Syria in the wake of last summer's war between the Shi'ite militia and Israel, according to reports by Saudi and Israeli intelligence sources that have been confirmed by Western diplomats in Beirut...
...fired over 3,000 rockets at Israel. "The Iranian pipeline through Syria was already working during the war," despite constant Israeli bombing raids on the roads into Lebanon from Syria, this Beirut source said. Officially, Syria and Iran deny that they're supplying weapons to Hizballah. As for the Shi'ite group itself, when asked about receiving a new shipment of arms from Syria and Iran, a spokesman told TIME, without elaborating, "We have more than enough weapons if Israel tries to attack us again...
...Iran's apparent efforts to destabilize Lebanon and to expand Shi'ite influence in Iraq and throughout the region are of major concern to the Saudi government, a leading power in the Sunni Muslim world that presumably would like to see the U.S. take a more active stance in Lebanon against its regional rivals. Obaid says that when Vice President Cheney visits King Abdallah bin Abd Al Aziz Al Saud Saturday in Riyadh, the Saudi king is expected to tell Cheney that "the Saudi leadership will not and cannot allow Iran, through Syria and Hizballah, to bring down the Lebanese...