Ambassador claims shortly before invasion,
Bush didn't know there were two sects of Islam

From the Raw Story courtesy of AlterNet:

A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”

And

“From the president and the vice president down through the neoconservatives at the Pentagon, there was a belief that Iraq was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society,” said Galbraith. “The arrogance came in the form of a belief that this could be accomplished with minimal effort and planning by the United States and that it was not important to know something about Iraq.”

The Bush Administration’s aims when it invaded Iraq in March 2003 were to bring it democracy and transform the Middle East. Instead, Iraq has reverted to its three constituent components: a pro-western Kurdistan, an Iran-dominated Shiite theocracy in the south, and a chaotic Sunni Arab region in the center.

Galbraith argues that because the new Iraq was never a voluntary creation of its people--but rather held together by force--America’s ongoing attempt to preserve a unified nation is guaranteed to fail, especially since it’s divided into three different entities.

Click here for the rest.

For my money, some of the best and most articulate political debate in the blogosphere is over at Rob Salkowitz's Emphasis Added. I remember the first time I jumped in on one of the lively discussions in EA comments: I made some casual remark about Noam Chomsky, the kind I've been dropping for years both here and as a commenter on other blogs, which usually seems to be pretty safe because so few bloggers seem to actually know much about him; unexpectedly, I got dogpiled, and it was the kind of assault that actually required me to think out my responses a bit. The whole fiasco even resulted in Rob posting on the main page a scathing anti-Chomsky screed. All my fault. Anyway, since then, now that I've figured out that I'm often swimming with intellectual sharks over there, I'm able to have some commenting debate fun at EA these days without feeling like the big idiot I'm sure I appeared to be during the Chomsky war.

That's all something of a digression. My point here is that I'm currently involved in something of a low level argument with another commenter that fits in very nicely with this new information about how our President really seems to be as ignorant as he appears. And it's a very arrogant ignorance. The Iraq situation is only the full manifestation of this arragnorance. For anybody who's been paying close attention since the beginning, the clues have always been there. Our pulling out of the ABM treaty and Kyoto Protocols, Bush's clear lack of understanding of some of the simplest foreign policy issues when interviewed by reporters during the 2000 campaign, the boneheaded Solomon like decision on stem cell research, all these things, and more, were early warning signals that not only is George Bush intellectually unqualified to hold the office of dog catcher, let alone the Presidency, but that he's damned proud and aggressive about his lack of knowledge.

When a dog catcher is proudly stupid, there's a stray dog problem, fortunately limited to a single town. When the President is proudly stupid, people die, lots of people, and that's what's happening in Iraq right now. I suppose Bush's folksy idiocy played well for voters in bowling alleys and honkey tonks, you know, the whole "regular guy" bullshit that pounded the comparatively elitist Gore and Kerry out of the water. But, clearly, reality has now outpaced image. A moron is a fine drinking buddy, especially when he's fun to ridicule, but this guy's the President. We really, really, really, need somebody in the White House who, at least, knows what he's doing.

I wonder how much more damage he's going to do before it's all over.

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