Maureen Dowd with her caustic with and biting sarcasm is one of my most favorite op-ed writers but today, she outdid herself with this opening paragraph in her NYT op-ed:
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
Iraq has rapidly descended into a worse chaos (if such a thing was even possible) and it looks more and more like a country that will end up being partitioned. If it does happen, it will be another blow to the notion of so called pan-Islamic identity, just like the partition of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It is a fool's errand to try and get Shias and Sunnis to come to terms with one another. After all, in Pakistan, they are still at it after 55 years of freedom from the British rule. And it does not help that a fool of a person is trying to do it with a foolish cabinet. I think that the best course of action for the US now is to get the hell out of Iraq, let Sunnis and Shias slaughter each other, let their proxies, the Saudis, the Syrians and the Iranians duel it out. What about the oil you say? Well $5 a gallon in Detroit, Mi will probably be the best thing that can happen to the US and to the environment.