Word: sunni
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...five cabinet positions left vacant in Tuesday's swearing in of a new Iraqi cabinet - and the decision by Sunni vice president Ghazi al-Yawer to boycott the ceremony - suggest that democracy and civil war are not mutually exclusive in Iraq. To be sure, the cabinet of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari- the first government chosen by Iraqis themselves in a half-century-is an historic milestone. It is difficult to envisage circumstances in which Iraqis would be prepared to surrender their hard-earned right to choose their leaders. Unfortunately, democracy has not resolved the ethnic conflict among them, which...
...five cabinet positions were to have been given to Sunnis, and their absence points to growing fissures in Iraq. The new government is dominated by the Shiite coalition that won January's election, and most of the remaining seats went to the Kurdish parties that finished second with some 27 percent of the vote. The ethnic makeup of the government, in itself, is a revolutionary development, since the Shiite majority and the Kurdish minority have always been marginalized from power in Baghdad - as they have throughout the Arab world - by a Sunni Arab minority that numbers less than 20 percent...
...Conventional wisdom among Iraq's new leaders, and among U.S. officials, is that that bringing on board credible Sunni leaders is the key to defeating the insurgency. Still, even that may be wishful thinking. Reserving five of the 37 cabinet position for Sunni Arabs may be based on an estimation of their proportion of the population, but the Sunni Arabs have ruled Iraq ever since the country was invented by the British in the wake of World War I, and a reluctance to let go of their traditional authority may make many wary of simply submitting to the combination...
...while I appreciate guns, I also appreciate the need for gun laws. Without them, Dad's quip--"A well-armed society is a polite society"--holds true only if your idea of "polite" is something akin to HBO's Deadwood or the Sunni triangle. Which is why I'm perturbed by the Florida legislature's decision to pass a bill, signed into law by Governor Jeb Bush last week, allowing virtually anyone who feels threatened at any time and in any place to whip out a gun and open fire. The law decrees that a person under attack...
...also worried that deep de-Baathification would worsen Iraq's sectarian divisions. While the current Shi'ite and Kurdish leadership spent much of the Saddam years in exile, Sunni leaders stayed and took part in the regime. Iraq's new leaders, who have long memories of the oppression of their people by an Iraqi military largely commanded by Sunni officers, view many Sunnis with suspicion and it's the Sunnis' turn to be nervous. "They do not mean 'Baathists'," said Abu Laith, the Iraqi captain. "They mean Sunnis...