The Iraq divide

Just read a pretty good story in Time. (Hopefully I'm not dbing this.)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592849,00.html

Great job of simplifying the whole ugly mess by providing a quick historical perspective. It's oversimplified to some degree, but if you're tired of hearing the words "Sunni" and "Shi'ite" while having no real clue as to what either of them mean, this should help a lot.

If only they had written this story prior to the US invasion, maybe we would've had some clue as to how to handle the post-war setup. Or the administration could've, you know, asked someone knowledgeable.

 

Thanks for posting that, Dog. Very insightful.

And it only serves to darken any optimism people might have that we can somehow succeed in Iraq.

 

I read that story in the mag. Very thorough and informative. It also touches on the Kurdish issue, which is a wild card unto itself.

 

What struck me is how we've sort of been misled about Iran's involvement in this mess and how our leaders, who work for a nation that was founded because of religious differences, completely ignored the impact of religion when setting up that goverment.

How many times have we been told that Iran is arming insurgents to fight against the US? While that might be true to some extent, fighting the US is only a byproduct of Iran's goal. It's like the administration is afraid to put the real story out there because they're not sure the majority of the country can understand it. Either that or they don't really understand it, which scares the hell out of me.

But allowing one side to take complete control of the government, place their militia men in police uniforms and continually taunt and belittle the other side is quite possibly the dumbest shit we've done in this war. The number of things we've allowed to happen over there, all of which have served to ratchet up the violence, reeks of ignorance. And all of it is additional proof -- as if you needed more -- that this administration had no plan whatsoever for post-war Iraq and did very little research before rushing off to war.