And what they don't know can kill us

From Hugh Fitzgerald. What they don't know at the State Department:

The Ur-source of the problem with American policy in Iraq is not that the government has been too bold, but too timid, afraid even synecdochically to allude to Islam, insistent on parroting until no one of any sense can stand it, that silly phrase about a 'war on terrorism' with no hint, no hint of a hint, that 'terrorism' is merely one instrument of Jihad, that 'Jihad' means a struggle, and that all over the world this duty of Jihad to spread Islam, as old as Islam itself, is being pursued in various ways of which terrorism is only one, and not even necessarily the most effective.

The American government, or many people in it, failed to understand two things when they went to Iraq. They failed to understand the history of Iraq itself, with its long-standing ethnic and sectarian divisions that in the case of the Sunni-Shi'a split go back to the fourth of the rightly-guided caliphs, a split that in the history of modern Iraq only widened, rather than narrowed, since the days of Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell. They failed to understand that the Kurds were hot for independence, and that a Kurdish state might usefully be exploited in order to raise the consciousness of non-Arab Muslims everywhere, beginning with the Berbers of North Africa (subjected not to the mass murder that the Kurds endured under Saddam Hussein, but rather to Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism). Paralyzing fear of Turkey, perhaps, or a belief that Turkey could still be described (as Richard Perle did in an interview in 2004) as 'secular' as if Kemalism were permanent, Islam transitory -- instead of, as we all now know, the reverse.

And there was just one other little thing, one other intelligence failure, that characterizes the American effort in Iraq, and the madness of the effort to create out of these three vilayets a moderate, rational, democratic nation-state that will prove a Light Unto the Muslim Nations. And that other little thing was Islam. There was not in 2001 an understanding of Islam; there was not such an understanding in the spring of 2003, when three American divisions in a few weeks conquered Iraq; there appears to be no such understanding now, at the top, of the nature of Islam, or why, for example, the campaign of Da'wa, and demographic conquest of Western Europe, is far more important a matter to address, and think of ways to reverse, than whether or not the Sunni lion can lie down with the Shi'a -- well, not exactly lamb, but lioness.