Three Way News

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Monday, August 07, 2006

Mistakes were made

Bernard Lewis, who was instrumental in advising Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials on the Iraq invasion, said: "The Iranian regime won't last very long after an overthrow of the regime in Iraq, and many other regimes in the region will feel threatened. This prediction was based on a pivotal misunderstanding about Iraq's Shiites, Mr. Nasr says: that their Iraqi and Arab identity would supersede their Shiite affinity with Iran. As it turned out, as soon as Shiites took power in Iraq, they eagerly threw open the gates to Iranian influence and support"

OK, there is no way in hell guys like me were going to be aware of this before the war in Iraq:

.... "Ethnic antagonism [between Arabs and Persians] cannot possibly be all-important when Iraq's supreme religious leader is Iranian and Iran's chief justice is Iraqi," writes Mr. Nasr in the current edition of Foreign Affairs magazine.

But shouldn't there have been a FEW people in the US who knew this and shouldn't at least one or two of them work for the Bush administration?

1 Comments:

Isn't the key (or one of the keys) here that Shiites are the minority sect worldwide? 85% of Muslims are Sunni. Shiites form a majority population in only about 4 countries in the world, including Iraq and Iran.

Again, I'm no scholar or expert, but the most radicalized Muslims are typically Sunni. These radical elements have no fondness for the minority Shia. Why wouldn't you expect majority Shia populations to band together in self-defense?

By Hammer, at 1:51 PM