In his new book, former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith claims that two months before the invasion of Iraq, president Bush was unaware that there were two main Muslim sects in Iraq.
A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech, 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!”
Galbraith explains this lack of knowledge about Iraq as part of “a culture of arrogance that pervaded the whole administration.”
From the president and the vice president down through the neoconservatives at the Pentagon, there was a belief that Iraq was a blank slate on which the United States could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society. The arrogance came in the form of a belief that this could be accomplished with minimal effort and planning by the United States and that it was not important to know something about Iraq.
As a result, Galbraith fears the US may have lost the war the very day it took Baghdad, and that the best that we can hope for is to avoid a worstening civil war.
There is no easy way out of Iraq, but when our policies only seem to make matters worse, we certainly must pull out our troops and then do the best we can to make up for the damage we have caused.