The Shiite regime has waged a 26-year war on pleasures both homosexual and heterosexual.

"The other reason, less stated publicly, is to get the Iraq government to commit to steps so that it is not a narrowly based Shiite regime."

The mullahs in Teheran might seek to set up another fundamentalist Shiite regime on Iraqi soil, a bleak prospect for Turkey and Arab states.

Created in 1982 as an umbrella organization for radical Shiite Muslims, Hezbollah was aligned with the Shiite regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Although there were scattered instances of fundamentalist, Islamic-inspired violence in the early 20th century, the issue gained international prominence only after the Iranian revolution brought a Shiite regime to power in 1979.

Neither did the Sunni Muslim royal family of Saudi Arabia wish to invite a Shiite revolutionary regime to its borders.

He has reportedly calculated that a fractured Iraq, or a Shiite fundamentalist regime in Baghdad, would offer the United States and its allies more problems that his own continued tenure.

Elections would also pressure the Shiite regime in neighboring Iran to liberalize.

If the Iraqi regime were to fall, it might be replaced by an Iraqi Shiite regime.

Iraq had provided a safe haven for the NLA, hoping to use it one day to topple the Shiite regime in Tehran.