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December 19, 2006
Saying it better than I could
I've been trying to put my finger on what I find so upsetting about the people who claim that the Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting for over a thousand years and who are we to think a little purple finger ink is going to stop it.
Juan over at Informed Comment nailed it:
I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.
While I agree we've unleashed it, I doubt we created it. My point is simply we should not pretend that Sunni-Shiite animosity made this historically inevitable.
Posted by OneEyedMan at December 19, 2006 12:27 PM
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