Hightower Lowdown

The most basic rule of war is this: Know your enemy.
A major reason that Bush’s Iraq war is such a disaster is that the commander-in-chief is clueless about the culture of Islamic people. That’s no surprise, since George W has the intellectual curiosity of a butter bean. But most of the Bushite counterterrorism officials also don’t know beans about their enemy.

Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, has recently been asking these officials a rather fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Since the Sunni- Shiite culture clash is a 1,400-year-old conflict that is now playing out in a civil war in Iraq, with our soldiers trapped in the middle, an understanding of this difference is crucial to the war.

The head of the FBI’s national security branch agreed that it is important for a man in his position to know the difference…but he didn’t. He could not even tell whether neighboring Iran is Sunni or Shiite—a rather crucial distinction, since the new Iraqi government is forging alliances with Iranian theocrats.

Stein’s question stumped Rep. Jo Ann Davis, who heads the subcommittee overseeing much of the CIA’s work in Islamic countries. “The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa,” she said. Rep. Terry Everett, head of a subcommittee on tactical intelligence, also stumbled. “I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something,” he said. Then he added, “Now that you’ve explained it to me, what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult.”

Golly, Terry…really? Shouldn’t you have thought about that several hundred thousand lives and $373 billion ago? Sheesh, these people clearly don’t know what they’re doing.