George,

I would like to refer your readers to a very good piece by the Council on Foreign Relations concerning Shiites in Iraq.

I hope that we don't end up making the same mistakes that we have made so many times before -- assuming that all people whom we don't understand are alike, assuming that opposition groups are monolithic, assuming that joy over being liberated will translate into a willingness to be ruled by the liberators, assuming that nationalists can be bought.

Unfortunately, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld worldview incorporates all of those mistakes; we wouldn't be in Iraq now if we hadn't already made those faulty assumptions.

If the CFR analysis is correct, the best recourse may be to get out quickly, to turn our attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and to hope that the Arabs will come to see as altruistic what they now view as imperialistic.

Lloyd Snook (electronic mail, April 23, 2003)