Over at The Next Hurrah, emptywheel has a useful multiple choice test for our representatives. It’s made up of questions like this:
1. The terrorist group Al Qaeda is overwhelmingly made up of what kind of Muslims?
a. Shiite
b. Sunni
c. Kurds
d. Nation of Islam
The answer is (b). And it is a question that our new House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes recently got wrong. Jeff Stein has been asking really simple questions like this of our foreign policy makers and he keeps discovering that our leaders (Democrat, Republican, FBI, Pentagon) don’t know the answers. I don’t really have any explanation for this phenomenon. I know the President did not know the differenece between Shi’ites and Sunnis until long after he decided to invade Iraq. But the President is a famously incurious and reckless man. What accounts for this same deficit manifesting itself throughout the halls of power?
I know that understanding the demographics and theology of the Muslim world is an immensely complicated undertaking, and I know that the various factions and rivalries and fourteen hundred years of history can make the eyes glaze over. Being a U.S. Representative doesn’t require one to have the equivalent of a master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies. But, on the other hand, we’ve been at war with Muslims of one stripe or another since 9/11/01. We fought a war in the Middle East in 1991. Before that we had the Lebanon bombings and Iranian revolution. I don’t expect every Congressperson to be fully versed on the dynamics and difficulties of the region, but I do expect that of those that are on our intelligence, foreign relations, and armed services committees. I expect it of our counterterrorism officials. I certainly expect it of our President and his foreign policy team. And we are not getting it. Our leaders don’t have a damn clue what they’re dealing with.
“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.“- Trent Lott, 5th Ranking Member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Now, Trent Lott was the Senate Minority Leader until December 2002 and he helped usher through the Iraq War Resolution. But he never bothered to familiarize himself with the history of Islam or the internal dynamics of Iraq. I want to know how this is possible. It isn’t just the fault of Trent Lott. Our intelligence agencies should be educating our intelligence committees. Maybe they should assign them homework and pop quizzes.
I was already highly educated about Middle Eastern affairs when 9/11 happened. I followed our war there in 1991, and I knew the difference between a Kurd, an Arab, and a Persian, and I knew the sectarian make-up of the country. I knew that Najaf and Karbala were the holiest shrines in Shi’a Islam and that they were located in Iraq. I knew that Hezbollah was Shi’a. I knew that Iran was Shi’a. I knew Saddam was Sunni. But after 9/11 I went out a bought a Koran and a bunch of books about Islam and I read them. I did it because I wanted to know as much as I could about why 9/11 happened and what we could or should do in response. What the hell did the people on our intelligence committees do? They apparently did not do shit. Do you think our enemies are this willfully ignorant of American society? I don’t.
So I support emptywheel. No one should be placed in a position of overseeing or implementing our foreign policies unless they can answer a basic list of questions correctly. If you don’t know the difference between Shi’a and Sunni, and in which countries they predominate, then learn it immediately. Don’t tell me you support Israel’s decision to defend themselves by bombing Lebanon if you can’t tell me whether or not Hezbollah comes from the same sect as Ayatollah Sistani and Prime Minister Maliki. If you don’t know the answer, you don’t deserve to have an opinion.
Idiots.
Fucking Unfucking double fucking so ridiculous I can barely type or speak. I am just completely without a clue here because this just fried my god damned brain. I don’t know if anything will compute for the rest of the day!
making up Iraq aren’t that difficult to understand either. I got it and understood it two weeks before my husband left for Iraq and our troops were parading across the desert. There were a few sociologists who stepped forward in those early times and laid it all out pretty clearly. It took me one day on the internet to get an idea of where he was going and who was what and what was likely to happen. The day he said goodbye and got on the bus to go to the plane we had been arguing how long he would be gone. He kept saying he’d be gone for 90 days max and I kept explaining why he would be gone for the old max time in a combat zone of one year. His last words to me were “see you in 90 days” and I couldn’t help myself, I shot back “nope, 365 days”! I wish I had been wrong but it wasn’t that hard to understand where our soldiers were going. It was all there on the internet and it took me one day with a toddler tearing down the house around me!
that is true. And it is understandable that you would take the time to investigate Iraq because your husband was being deployed there. Imagine if you had to vote on whether to send other people’s spouses there? Do you think you might make the same effort?
How about after nearly four years?
I can’t even call this the laziness that arrogance breeds! I can’t identify what the hell this is! For crying out loud as hell……when you have a bevy of aides nobody could hit google for a few hours? Nobody could make a call to anybody who maybe spent their whole life studying such things? I bet the aides have made plenty of latte runs though. How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead now and there never were any WMDs? Now your Army and your Marines are broken and oh by the way so is all of their equipment and so is your bank! I’m so frustrated about this, it’s unfathomable except it is really happening.
Politics for most of our leaders is about getting themselves elected and re-elected. You expect them to rationally weigh the options before them to determine what’s best for the country because that is what an emotionally healthy empathetic person would do, but they don’t see it from that perspective at all. They don’t give much thought to any of the bills they vote on because there is always someone else to tell them what vote would best help their efforts to get re-elected. Personal power is the be-all and end-all of their analysis, it’s disgusting how superficial and narcissistic almost all national public figures are.
I would imagine that many folks get this wrong because they, like I, received a basic instruction in Islam in the 1980s, when we were told: Sunni=Good Shi’ite=Bad. This was a consequence, by the way, of the American support for Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war. And believe me when I say this is no excuse.
Can you imagine if, in World War II, it was an open secret that no one in the Senate really knew what Nazi stood for (National Socialist Party), or who Joseph Goebbels was?
If the right wing wants their WWII comparisons, they need to explain why they know more about the situation in Normandy, 1944 than they do about Al-Anbar province (can they even point to Al-Anbar on a map of Iraq?) in 2006.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least – look at number of officials who don’t believe in evolution that are running our science and medical policies, or who don’t believe in global warming that are running our environmental policies, etc.
A nation run by people oblivious to facts, of whatever stripe or party, is on the path to certain ruin.
Facts play no party politics; they are the great equalizer: the intelligent survive (and often thrive), the stupid (however devout, however personable, however rich, however telegenic or electable) in the end fail and, perhaps, die. It goes for nations as much as for individuals.
And we get the government we deserve. Why do you think Jefferson considered educating the public so vital to maintaining our nation?
Maybe they should just hire the folks with Masters degrees in Near Eastern Studies. Lord knows, the Feds paid for ’em with the Foreign Language and Area Studies grant program.
😉
Most of my friends, including myself, with such degrees use them primarily to rock at scrabble and crossword puzzles after being held to be too sympathetic to the subjects of their studies by the powers that be. One can only be unbiased by being ignorant.
Yes it is somewhat amazing that the political leaders are so ignorant of the field they are supposed to deal with on a regular basis. They at least ought to have a fraction of knowledge on the field to which they are assigned. The irony of this is that Silvestre Reyes is the new House Intelligence chair, a committee that ought to be the spearhead of knowledge on these issues.
These would be many of the same people who have supported rollbacks of environmental protections during the last few years, without having any idea about the consequences of their actions. (Clearskies, anyone?) Why should this be any surprise? All they need to know is that big business can derive a benefit. End of inquiry.
Counting on ignorant opportunists in Congress is as hopeless as the nightmare that they’ve created. It’s up to us as citizens to demand an end to this criminal fiasco.
is what our establishment is all about. Sell it to the average Joe even if it is not right and then you can get on with your evil plan.
We have a very strong Eurocentric view of life outside the U.S. – not that we know European history or culture very well, either. Mostly we have a U.S.Mythocentric view.
I’m not surprised by the lack of knowledge of our congressfolk. There is in the circles of the powerful, the idea that those in power are in the know, or they will simply bring in someone who does know to inform them. They needn’t know themselves. And there is the idea among too many, that because they have been “chosen” or elected or born or somehow ended up in the ranks of the powerful, that they are brighter, better informed, more knowledgable than the rest of the country.
We see their feet of clay, and the damage and danger it has brought on. We are a bit different from them, in mostly not being among the powerful, and mostly having more education than the average member of congress – or being more serious about learning. Educated people aren’t highly popular as politicians here in the modern era, I think.
Unfortunately, we aren’t immune to this kind of chauvinism ourselves. Some progressives tend to disregard or listen less seriously to persons who aren’t educated, or who are quite religious, or who speak with certain kinds of accents (Southern). I hope these characteristics don’t lead to the bad outcomes that we see and fear before us in our “leadership”.
I don’t believe your politicians don’t know this. I see statements like that of Trent Lott mmore as not reflecting ignorance but at a means to sustain the image of American innocense. “See how bad they are. We as Americans can not even imagine people being so ‘evil'”.
I think it’s pure rethoric. Likewise Bush’s “Why do they hate us?” was the vehicle after 9/11 for Americans not to delve to much into questioning their own goverment.