OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Shiites, Sunnis and George Bush

Second World War:

WWII changed all equations. The Soviet Union and the United States divided the world to two camps, while the British Empire turned into an international nuisance hated in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Americans ruled the Middle East with their puppet governments in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The pre- world war conflicts intensified, leading to pan Arabism and clashes of Shiite and Sunnies in Iraq and Lebanon, and the Arab Israeli wars.

Iraq was never an independent country, it was a part of the Ottoman Empire and the conflicts between Shiites and Sunnies had been going on for more than a thousand years. The Shiites lived on the east side of the river Tigress. The same ghetto recently renamed Sadder City. The Shiia majority was brutally run by Sunni minority.

With the rise of Saddam Hussein to power, coupled with the Iranian revolution, things got worse. Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites in order to stay in power. His now infamous words are well known:

"God in his creation made three errors Jews, Iranians, and the fly."

Then there were the Gulf Wars I and II. Although Gulf War I was conducted with success, the Shiites were left alone yet again and then were massacred by Saddam. Naturally, during the second war they sided with Americans but this time, developed their own militia in case they were abandoned one more time.

George Bush and the War:

I think we all can accept that we are a by-product of our past and unfortunately, this rule applies to the president as well. During the Vietnam War the president was able to get himself into the pilot school with the help of his father. He scored at 25th percentile which is the lowest grade acceptable to this program. One would assume that if a person is able to become a pilot, or a lawyer or a doctor, that he would be eager to practice what he has been trained for. However, Bush chose to go and work on other people's political campaigns, leaving us with the assumption that becoming a pilot was just a way of competing with the father who was a real war hero.

After 9/11, he had the opportunity to compete with his father again. The problem was that Bush Jr. did not have the abilities that the father had; he was poorly educated with very limited knowledge of international affairs. His style of running the war was like a MBA running a corporation - and very different to his father's who knew every player personally. The differences in character make-up of the father and son is so pronounced that it will take years and many books to analyze the differences. Perhaps Bush's mother put it the best. When she was told that her son was going to run for president, she said:

"No, not him, he is like me - he is the family clown."

It is a rule in psychology that most of the time in relationships between two people, the more intelligent figure becomes the dominant one. We can observe this phenomenon when the president simply gave up the rule of the country to Dick Cheney, and other people around him, as long as they were completely loyal to him. Consequently, when real problems like 9/11 and Katrina came around there was not an intelligent, knowledgeable president to make the decisions. The only thing he was superior in was taking vacations.

Political and military errors

I must confess that when Bush began to talk about invading Iraq, I shared his illusion. Being an Iranian American, I thought the U.S would roll over Iraq and that would give us the platform to go after the Ayatollahs in Iran. But, I was mistaken; within a few months it was obvious that Americans had miscalculated the entire thing. The differences between the first Gulf War and the second one are too vast and varied to mention them all. Here are a few:

(1) The commander of the first war Norman Schwarzkopf, was born and raised in Iran. His father was the American military attaché to Iran and knew the Middle East upside down. Schwarzkopf's IQ was estimated as170. The commander of the second war was AbuZaid who was a paper tiger, and never asked for more troops until Rumsfeld resigned.

(2) The first war included Arab countries like Syria. The second war had a token number of soldiers from different countries.

(3) The total number of American soldiers of the first war was 500,000. The total for the second war was about 150,000.

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