Word: shi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shi'ite exile, 58, has spent the past quarter-century positioning himself as the leading opponent of Saddam. In the process, he has accumulated as much contempt as admiration. Last week's stage-managed arrival made it look as if the U.S. was anointing Chalabi to lead Iraq. Yet if his supporters in the Pentagon hoped to convert him into a ready-made replacement for Saddam, Chalabi's very appearance on the scene sparked sharp resistance. Some State Department officials who have long regarded Chalabi as a divisive, untrustworthy figure charged that he is more popular on the Potomac than...
...fill the vacuum. The U.S. has to be careful. It's just possible that the worst thing Washington could do is handpick a winner, who would be tainted as an American puppet. The dangers of that were apparent in Najaf, where the mob murder of a pro-American Shi'ite cleric last week showed how lethal such an image...
...speed with which the Iraqi regime disintegrated left little time for celebrating. Who was going to turn the electricity back on, restore order to the cities and prevent a civil war from breaking out between Arabs and Kurds in the north, between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in the south or within the thousand pockets of hate that a merciless regime left behind? In Najaf a meeting that the U.S. arranged between rival Shi'ite clerics to pave a road to reconciliation ended with both being hacked to death by an angry mob. In Kirkuk a Saddam loyalist who surrendered...
...fear is that these radicals could incite more suicide bombings aimed at U.S. troops. Yet it's far from certain that these groups could combine to form a significant threat. Hizballah and the Islamic Jihad share few values with Saddam's Baathist nationalists. And Iraqi Shi'ites and Iranian Shi'ites are not ideological soul mates; fears after Gulf War I that the two would join up to carve out a separate state aligned with Iran proved to be unfounded...
...Iraqi people, it just isn't clear that they're particularly happy about all this. The Kurds are thrilled; the Shi'ites will not lament Saddam's passing--but there is understandable caution and fear about what comes next. There may well be jubilation when the last of the Baathist thugs has been routed, but those scenes have already been neutered in the Islamic world by the--outrageously distorted--images of American violence and, more problematically, by the plain fact that infidels have made war on an Islamic state. (One imagines that even the Kurds and Shi'ites have understandable...