Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...full body armor (when available) and shelter behind high blast walls, their British counterparts were patrolling Basra in soft caps and smilingly accepting cups of tea from roadside vendors. This bonhomie was claimed to be the result of that superior understanding of Iraqi culture. Never mind that managing mostly Shi'ite Basra was a picnic compared to running the much more heterogeneous and volatile Baghdad...
...went downhill from there, to the point where the British are just as unwelcome in the Shi'ite south as the Americans are in the Sunni Triangle. An opinion poll conducted shortly before the Dec 15 elections showed that Basrans are overwhelmingly hostile toward the British. So how come the British suffer so few casualties, as compared to the Americans? That's mainly because, unlike the Sunni insurgents who attack the Americans in and around Baghdad, the Shi'ite militias in the south already wield political power - they may resent the British presence, but it doesn't stop them from...
...soft-spoken physician did little to heal the sectarian wounds tearing apart Iraqi society. After the Sunni boycott of last January's vote, Jafaari-prompted by the U.S.-brought some Sunni leaders into the consultation process over the new Iraqi constitution. But he looked away as his ruling Shi'ite-Kurdish coalition ignored most Sunni demands, and his security forces constantly harassed the few Sunni leaders who were willing to negotiate. Administratively, Jafaari's government failed on every front-security, the economy, jobs, infrastructure. His only success was in the mending of relations with Iraq's old enemy (and Jafaari...
...Abdul-Mahdi succeeds Jafaari, don't expect any real change. He has switched directions so many times in his career, it's hard to know which way he's going. He has been a Communist, a Ba'athist and a liberal-secular democrat; these days, he represents the Shi'ite-fundamentalist Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which, like Jafaari's Dawa Party, is beholden to Tehran. Halfway through last year, Mahdi told TIME he was about to bolt from SCIRI and form his own party. He changed his mind-likely because he knows he has no grassroots...
...only one of the four with even less credibility than Allawi is Chalabi. While claiming to be a secular politician, he went into last January's election as a member of the Shi'ite coalition, as an ally of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. This time around, he contested the election on his own-and appears to have failed to win a single seat outright. The elections proved what most journalists have suspected all along: that Chalabi is one of Iraq's most despised political figures. Only in the surreal world of Iraqi politics would such a man even...