The Myth of the Surge - Nir Rosen
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...h_of_the_surge
Interesting article, but I found this curious:
Quote:
"Before the war, it was just one party," Arkan tells me. "Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good." He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. "In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.
The army, sure, but the Baath Party was majority Shiite? And didn't the suppression of the Shiite revolt in 1991 have just a bit of an impact on sectarian relations in Iraq?
A lot of the current Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq
is, IMO, due to many 'predictions' about it written in the 2002-03 time frame by many so-called 'Middle East Experts" and academics like Juan Cole (who had / has an agenda).
Historically and typically, there was no significant divide in Iraq, yet there were and are people on both sides of that schism in Iraq and the ME who read and prowl the internet and who quickly seized on what was appearing regularly in the generally ignorant western media as a 'divide' and 'thirst for revenge' as a ready made rationale for pursuit of their own agendas.
Said prognosticators and the media thus through essential ignorance, I strongly believe, produced a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Rosen certainly has an agenda. As does the New America foundation...
Best ignored, I think.