I can’t take it anymore. I am so glad there is an election coming up, because if there were not an election coming up and some hope for a change in leadership, I would just despair. I firmly believe there is just something fundamentally different and deficient about the brains of Republicans. How long have the Republicans been saying that we are fighting a War on Terrorism? How long have they been talking about Islamofacism? The War on Terror has now lasted longer than the Civil War, the Korean War, or than our participation in either World War. And, yet, despite this, the people charged with protecting us and winning this war do not know the difference between a Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim.

Not “Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.” Not “Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch.” Not Gary Bald, (once) the FBI’s counterterrorism chief. Not “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.” None of these individuals knew how to answer when reporter Jeff Stein asked them to articulate the difference.

Here’s the exchange he had with Rep. Everett:

“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.”

Allow me to go off on a little rant. I learned the difference between a Sunni and Shi’ite when I was a senior in high school. It helped explain the 1979 Iranian revolution, the kidnappings in Beirut, and the Iran-Contra affair. It gave them a context that was missing without understanding the history of Shi’ism. I had further opportunity to learn about the differences within Islam when we fought the Persian Gulf War. Yeah, we went to war on the other side of the world, and the government said all kinds of nasty things about Saddam Hussein, including that he persucuted the majority Shi’ite population of his country. I also learned all about the Kurdish minority in Iraq, which is mainly Sunni (or Sufi, wanna ask our counterintelligence officials what the fuck that is?) but is ethnically different from Arabs like Saddam Hussein.

At the end of the Persian Gulf War, Poppy Bush urged the Shi’ites and the Kurds to rise up and overthrow Saddam. They attempted to do so and were massacred while we stood by twiddling our thumbs. A lot of American foreign policy brainiacs were surprised that the Shi’ites remembered that twelve years later when we arrived expecting flowers and chocolates.

Let me make this really clear to all of you, who may not know about the differences between Sunnis and Shi’ites. It’s not really that important that you know what exactly divides them from a theological point of view. It would be useful and it would help explain why the Shi’ites were the ones to first adopt suicide bombing (they are really into martyrdom because their most revered Imams were martyred). What is much more important than understanding their religious beliefs is knowing whether certain countries are ruled by Sunnis or Shi’ites, whether that is reflective of their population, and what sect differing terrorist groups belong to. Without that knowledge you might as well try to figure out terrorism in Ireland without knowing whether the IRA is Catholic or Protestant. No, you don’t need to know what Anglicanism has to say about papal infallibility in order to understand the Northern Ireland conflict, but you damn well better understand that Boston based Catholics are funding the terrorists. Got that? Jesus.

Here’s a little primer. Iran is a Shi’ite dominated country. They had a revolution in 1979 which brought a renowned Shi’ite Islamic scholar to power as their supreme leader. He died ten years later and the country is now run by a less renowned Shi’ite Islamic scholar. It is not run by the funny looking guy in a Members Only jacket named Ahmedinejad. He is only the President of the country and has little real power, and almost none when it comes to matters of intelligence or military action.

Iran has some allies. Their number one ally is Hizbollah, an organization they set up in Lebanon in the 1980’s, which took many American hostages and then ransomed them back to us when we gave Iran TOW missiles, a bible and a cake. That was all done by Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, William Casey. You remember? Neither did Reagan.

Iran also has some allies in Iraq. Iraq is about 60% Shi’ite, even though it has been ruled by Sunnis since its creation (and before its creation). The two most important shrines in Shi’a Islam are in Karbala and Najaf (for nimrods, those cities are in Iraq). That is where Iman Ali and Iman Hussain were killed. Google it.

But Iraqi Shi’ites are not all cuddly with Iran. You might remember that they fought a brutal war with each other. It was called the Iran-Iraq War. We helped both sides. We gave Saddam satellite intelligence and some equipment (his army was Soviet based), we quietly gave Iran replacement parts (they had the Shah’s American based army) and TOW missiles, a Bible, and a cake. This is an important piece of history because it helps explain the lack of flowers and chocolates.

For those of you still reading this, the Sunnis make up the vast majority of Muslims in the world. In fact, Iraq, Iran, and (I don’t know, Bahrain?) are the only countries where Shi’ites actually constitute a majority. Everywhere else they are a minority and they are usually discriminated against. In Afghanistan and Pakistan they are discriminated against quite harshly. Think Jim Crow and you’ll have a bit of the picture.

That is why the Shi’ites in Iraq have a bit of an attitude now that they are in power. They’ve been down for a very long time and they have a lot of scores to settle. Meanwhile, there are significant Shi’ite minorities in other countries, like Saudi Arabia, that are getting stirred up by both the Iranians and the Iraqis, and they want their rights now too. That is why the countries surrounding Iraq, like Turkey and Jordan and Syria and Saudi Arabia, are not too keen on taking the Iraqi government’s side in a civil war against Sunni insurgents. Are you knuckleheads beginning to understand how pathetic is it to be this far into a war in Iraq and to not know which parties are Shi’a and which are Sunni?

Once last question. Any idea whether Usama bin-Laden and Ayman Zaqahiri are Sunnis or Shi’a? I didn’t think so.

Even our President only recently learned the difference. This is spite of the fact that his daddy waged a war there, that his daddy urged the Shi’ites to rise up and they were crushed. This is in spite of the fact that Bush was given intelligence briefings about Iraq even before he became President and every damn day since.

The magnitude of this stupidity cannot be exaggerated. It simply cannot be exaggerated. It’s akin to fighting the wars in Korea and Vietnam without realizing which side is communist or being able to identify which other countries are communist and might be helping the enemy. It’s even more insane that that. It’s even more pathetic than that.

One thing about Democrats that tends to distinguish us from Republicans is that we actually try to understand the world around us rather than focusing on some ethereal world that is to come after we die.

We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by willful idiots. How can you have the job of overseeing the CIA’s peformance in the recruitment of Islamic spies and not know the difference between Shi’a and Sunni? Only a total incurious and supremely incompetent idiot would not know the difference after this amount of time.

Go buy a Koran and some books on Islam. Do your fucking job. Fuck.