Word: itely
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After almost a century of second-class citizenship, the Shi'ites are on the threshold of securing a major place in Iraqi politics. Up to now, most seemed to share the Shi'ite establishment's preference for the quietist approach that Sistani espouses: leave politics to the politicians while the clergy serves society's spiritual and social needs. Though the reclusive Sistani has exerted a strong influence over Iraq's temporary, U.S.-picked Governing Council to help ensure that Shi'ites will gain meaningful power for the first time, he has never sought a ruling role. Under his nonviolent guidance...
...Muqtada al-Sadr's way. He shares with the late Iranian revolutionary Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini a belief in rule by the clergy in a strict theocratic state. Al-Sadr's strategy, it now appears, is to engage coalition forces in a deadly confrontation, in the belief that Iraqi Shi'ites will support him in a direct showdown with the U.S. His rabid anti-Americanism, which previously failed to connect with the majority of Shi'ites, now strikes a chord. A year after the war began, their tolerance is exhausted. The lower rungs of society are fed up with the slow...
...feels that enough is enough. "We have to take him down," says an Administration official in Washington. But attacks last week on the Mahdi Army make it unlikely that moderate Shi'ite leaders can act to sideline the young firebrand. Sistani would no doubt love to see the end of his headstrong rival, but it's hard to imagine an Iraqi mullah condoning U.S. action against an Islamic cleric. In the past, Sistani marginalized al-Sadr by ignoring him, according to Noah Feldman, a New York University professor who was an adviser to the coalition authority. As a result...
...risks of going after al-Sadr. It had been obvious for months that they could not stabilize Iraq until rabble militias like the Mahdi Army were dismantled. But even some inside the Administration wonder why Bremer acted now, given the imperative of maintaining the tenuous support of the Shi'ite population in the run-up to the handover of sovereignty. "It wasn't our decision," said Brigadier General Hertling, whose units lost eight men in the initial fire fight with al-Sadr's men last week. An aide to an Iraqi Governing Council member called the timing...
...they struggled to explain the unnerving drop-off in Shi'ite support for the occupation, some U.S. officials suggested a familiar foe might be helping to stoke the uprising. "We know the Iranians have been meddling," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters last week. "And it's unhelpful to have neighboring countries meddling in the affairs of Iraq...