Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blunt: the U.S. military campaign to stabilize Iraq has failed. We have lost control of Anbar province, the Sunni stronghold. We are losing the battle for Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr's militia has taken control in several predominantly Shi'ite provinces. The government in Baghdad is near collapse. Sadr's support is the only real power base that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has left. If the political equation isn't changed soon, it is likely that Sadr will emerge as the de jure leader of Shi'ite Iraq. This will certainly lead to a full-scale civil...
...there any viable options to anarchy? More troops? The U.S. military is overstretched and exhausted. Partition? The atmosphere in Baghdad is too chaotic and bitter for a new power-sharing deal among the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. The last best chance to restore order and hold Iraq together may be a dramatic ecumenical expansion of the Iraqi security forces under new leadership. We need to rectify the most serious error we made in Iraq after our initial military success and restore elements of the Baath Party, especially its former Shi'ite military leaders, to positions of power. Each...
...capture. We are negotiating in Jordan with Baathist representatives of the Sunni insurgency; we're trying to split them off from the al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia terrorists, and we may succeed if a re-Baathification program is put in place. It is less well known that Sadr's Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army, also has a strong Baathist component. U.S. military intelligence estimates that upwards of 30% of Sadr's militia leaders are former members of Saddam's armed forces. There is communication, and occasionally collaboration, between these Sunni and Shi'ite Baathists. In the spring of 2004, elements...
...Shi'ite anger has been stoked by rumors, currently rife in Baghdad's political circles, that the U.S. is seeking to replace the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki with a more secular leadership, perhaps including some elements of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party. Unsurprisngly, relations between al-Maliki and the U.S. have turned distinctly prickly. Sources tell TIME that the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme religious figure in Iraqi Shi'ism, has been alarmed by these rumors and asked al-Maliki about them when the Prime Minister visited the cleric in Najaf last...
...What Sistani-and other religious figures-will make of the Cardona debacle can only be guessed. The news broke too late to be brought up at the Friday prayers, traditionally the pulpit from which the Muslim clergy (Sunni and Shi'ite alike) comment on the important political developments of the week...