Word: sunni
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...invented the art of distilling fermented beverages into alcoholic spirits, and then exported it during the Islamic conquests of the Middle Ages. They practice it still by making arak, a grape-based anise-flavored drink. Today, the majority owners of Lebanon's two largest wineries are, respectively, Druze and Sunni Muslims. The workforce that picks the grapes, and the landowners who grow them are almost all Muslims. And only God knows how many of Lebanon's wine drinkers are also Muslims...
...sharing arrangement. That, quite simply, has not happened, nor is there any sign that it's likely to. The reason the politicians have failed to agree is not the violence on the streets; the violence itself is in most instances a symptom of the power struggles between Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish factions, as well as, in some cases, the internecine struggles for political dominance within those communities. The power struggle among Iraqis is nowhere near over...
...limited has progress been on the political front that the prime achievement the Bush Administration has been touting is the alliance the U.S. has struck up with Sunni tribal sheikhs in Anbar province against al-Qaeda. This is certainly an important tactical advance in confronting the jihadists in Iraq - although it's not entirely clear whether the greater shift has come from the sheikhs (long a backbone of both the Saddam regime and then of the insurgency), or from the U.S. in finally recognizing that the Ba'athists were open to cooperation against al-Qaeda. Although the fighters represented...
...only outside of the Iraqi government; they are actively opposed to it, seeing it as a Shi'ite entity beholden to Iran. Such cooperation helps deal with the problem of al-Qaeda in Iraq - a brutal presence, to be sure, but still a minority element in the overall Sunni insurgency - but it doesn't necessarily reinforce national reconciliation...
...every province, the thinking went, then the insurgency might finally fade enough to allow the government in Baghdad to function properly. Never mind that the Shi'ite sectarian partisans of the Iraqi government in Baghdad led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seemed altogether unwilling to include such Sunni local leaders in the political process. Grassroots success would reshape the political landscape and allow things to work out,or so the Americans hoped. And so U.S. military leaders sought more tribal chieftains in other provinces, and continue to do so even now. The sheik may have been an unsavory...