"I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"At a January meeting on Iraq, it was obvious Bush did not know the difference between Shia and Sunni, responding at one point in the briefing:
"I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”The author Peter Galbraith will be going on a book tour. This will be big news as he makes his rounds.
From a discussion group:
What does Bush know of the differences among the Kurds, Turkmen or the Assyrian-Chaldean Christians, or between
Shiite and Sunni Muslims?
The New York Times Magazine (NYM) recently revealed that in September 2002, the U.S. president knew absolutely nothing about the ethnic, religious and political mosaic that would need to be borne in mind when
organizing any type of Iraqi Yalta Conference. Last January during a meeting packaged under the grandiose name of the Project for the Future of Iraq (NYM) Baby Bush demonstrated he had just learned of the large opposing sectors existing in Iraq, probably the most fragmented country in the Arab world.
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.cuba/browse_thread/thread/63c97e032e9c42ca/813e08150fda2a9a?lnk=st&q=&rnum=7&hl=en#813e08150fda2a9aFrom Raw Story:
Ambassador claims shortly before invasion, Bush didn't know there were two sects of Islam
Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.
In his new book,
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
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!”http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Ambassador_claims_shortly_before_invasion_Bush_0804.html This quote could really wake some people up and make them less anti-intellectual if it gets out.
Beyond that, the future is going to be far worse in Iraq, those 2 sects Bush didn't know about are in a civil war with 100 dead a day, while the al-Sadr cult is organizing a million Shia to march in Baghdad to chant Death to America and Death to Israel. Iran is now far stronger than it was, arming and training the Shia militia, who pay for the weapons with the 30% of annual oil production they siphon off. We are going to lose the war without a doubt now and the US and UK will be chased out by an armed Shia army, in conjunction with Iran. This Iran's smart plan to tie the US down in Iraq and need to actually increase troops there--so an Iranian land invasion cannot be put together.
please remember to recommend to get this quote out to more people