Your Tax Dollars at Work
Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.
“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.
Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”
To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”
Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
Fantastic.
posted by Joshua @ 5:29 PM
1 Comments:
Yeah… not surprising. I highly recommend the film “Control Room” to anyone with access to a decent video store. It’s a documentary from the early days of the Iraq war focusing on the people who work at Al Jazeera, but overall showing the relationship beween the media and the soldiers who are assigned to deal with PR for the war.
Anyway, the reason for me mentioning this is one of the film’s main subjects is Lt. Josh Rushing , who was on duty as a military liaison to Hollywood films when he was called to Iraq to deal with the media. Feeling that he should know something about the area he was going to, he bought a few books along the lines of “Iraq and Islam for Dummies” to read on the plane. Arriving there, he found he was the most knowledgeable person in his division on Iraq and on Middle Eastern relations. Yeah… Needless to say, his transformation from a soldier parroting military policy to a man who’s starting to understand how US actions might be perceived differently in the East versus the West is fascinating.
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