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

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!”

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  thanks to Huffington Post

How can such a dumbfuck be running this circus?

General John Abizaid: Iraq Is As Bad As I've Seen It

In the four years from 1941-45, America fought two wars on different sides of the earth; developed, built, and deployed atomic weapons; and thought through those important words, "What comes next." Nearly five years after bin Laden, despite an American occupation, Iraq is about to blow. We are still engaged in fighting -- and the problems are increasing, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan. Let's just forget for a moment that some in the Bush administration advocated Israel striking Syria -- and that we have a hot crisis in the Middle East between Israel and Lebanon, a bleeding ulcer in the Palestine-Israel conflict, and a brewing set of problems with both Iran and North Korea. This exchange today at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: SEN. CARL LEVIN: Do you agree, General, that -- with the ambassador from Britain to Iraq that Iraq is sliding towards civil war? GEN. ABIZAID: I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.

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Iraqi civil war has already begun, U.S. troops say

While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun. Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

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  thanks to Huffington Post

Tomgram: Judith Coburn on Flunking Counterinsurgency 101

Now consider Iraq. The U.S. military -- even more now than then the mightiest force on the planet -- has been fought to something like a stalemate by perhaps 20,000 relatively underarmed (compared to the Vietnamese) insurgents in a rag-tag minority rebellion, lacking a unified political party or program, or support from any major state power. Now consider Lebanon, where the mightiest regional military in the Middle East, the Israeli Army, which in 1982 made it to Beirut in a flash before bogging down for 18 years, has in the last three weeks not managed to secure several miles on the other side of its own border against another relatively isolated minority guerrilla movement. This perhaps tells us something about the way, in this new millennium, we are not in the Vietnam era, but you'd be hard-pressed to know that from the Bush administration's recent policies. What's so grimly fascinating, as Coburn indicates below, is that our old counterinsurgency policies, which didn't work in Vietnam, have now proved utterly bankrupt against vastly weaker forces. On guerrilla war, our leaders, political and military, are evidently nothing short of brain-dead. Now, consider Coburn's striking piece on two failed wars, two disastrous eras of U.S. military policy abroad, and wonder whether we aren't really in Hell.

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