Why did the Bush Administration fail to adequately plan to prevent Iraq from fracturing along religious sectarian lines?
In his new book, Peter Galbraith has revealed one possible reason : President Bush might not have even known that Iraq had religious sects.
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!”
If that seems too appalling to be true, remember that, at roughly the same time, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz testified in front of Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife.
“We have no idea what kind of ethnic strife might appear in the future, although as I have noted, it has not been the history of Iraq’s past.”