Choosing sides
Seymour Hersh, the frequent contributor to The New Yorker and one of the primary journalists who broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story, has written a new piece on shifting U.S. policies in the Middle East.
Since the invasion of Iraq has had the unintended consequence of empowering Iran, Hersh asserts that the Bush administration is adjusting its priorities in the Middle East and choosing to side with the Sunnis over the Shiites. To explain the inconsistency of our bringing down Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, Hersh says that the administration believed that after the bloody Iraq-Iran war of the 80s, Iraqis would feel more loyalty to their country than to their sect. That proved to be a faulty assumption.
Read the article, "The Redirection," or listen to Hersh being interviewed on yesterday's edition of Fresh Air.
The map below was taken from a report to Congress and shows an estimated Sunni/Shiite breakdown by country (the map appears near the end of the report):
Since the invasion of Iraq has had the unintended consequence of empowering Iran, Hersh asserts that the Bush administration is adjusting its priorities in the Middle East and choosing to side with the Sunnis over the Shiites. To explain the inconsistency of our bringing down Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, Hersh says that the administration believed that after the bloody Iraq-Iran war of the 80s, Iraqis would feel more loyalty to their country than to their sect. That proved to be a faulty assumption.
Read the article, "The Redirection," or listen to Hersh being interviewed on yesterday's edition of Fresh Air.
The map below was taken from a report to Congress and shows an estimated Sunni/Shiite breakdown by country (the map appears near the end of the report):
posted by michael at 2:16 PM
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