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Showing posts from February 25, 2006

Smart minds think... Perfect Storm

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Guardian All at sea in the Middle East's perfect storm Simon Tisdall Friday February 24, 2006 Business Times - 16 Feb 2006 A perfect geo-political storm taking shape The ingredients are Iraq, Iran, Hamas and cartoons deemed blasphemous by Muslims By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT From Peter Galbraith, "The Mess" The New York Review of Books, March 9, 2006 Today, Moqtada al-Sadr controls one of the largest factions within the victorious United Iraq Alliance (UIA), the coalition of Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 national elections. Nor is he the only member of the Alliance likely to side with Iran if war comes. SCIRI—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—is Iraq's largest political party. It was founded in Tehran in 1982, and its name gives an accurate idea of its politics. The Iranians also created, trained, and apparently still fund SCIRI's military wing, the Badr Corps, which has over 12,000 troops. Iraq's interior