Word: sunnis
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...dangerous scenario facing Lebanon this week. On Wednesday, members of the country's parliament are scheduled to vote on a replacement for Emile Lahoud, whose term ends midnight Friday. By unwritten agreement in this deeply sectarian nation, the President must be a Maronite Christian (the Prime Minister must be Sunni; the speaker of the assembly Shi'ite). Lahoud was an advocate of the policies of neighboring Syria, which until 2005 was the overlord of Lebanon...
...Sunday Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed a "remarkable" decline in violence, saying the country may have finally moved beyond the Sunni-Shi'a sectarian conflict. While that level of optimism may be premature, the security situation has improved dramatically in recent months...
...roots of the conflicts which torment the international community nearly a century later. Most importantly, Andelman contends that the Treaty’s oversight of a number of issues in the Middle East—namely their failure to understand the entrenched antagonisms between Shi’ites and Sunni and between Bedouin Arabs and Palestinians—has contributed to the modern-day plagues of terrorism and conflicts ranging from the Iranian Revolution to the Iraq war. But accounts like Andelman’s lead one to wonder how examining the past can help us to move forward...
...have been days, in recent weeks, when even Baghdad approached a tolerable level of urban violence and criminality. "And the Ramadi meeting wasn't at all unique," a senior U.S. diplomat told me. "You've had mass meetings of tribal leaders from Anbar and Karbala provinces," which are the Sunni and Shi'ite heartlands, respectively. "The governors of those provinces were literally building trenches on their border, and they are now meeting regularly. You had the highest-ranking Sunni politician in the country, Tariq al-Hashemi, go to Najaf to meet with the leading Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatullah...
...apparent progress raises two questions: First, as always, what's the catch? And second, if the progress is real, if the Sunni extremists have been routed, if Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed to the point of near pacification, if the bottom-up reconciliation efforts are gaining momentum, what is the U.S. military mission now? Why can't we start bringing home the bulk of our troops immediately...