Baffling

Tristero:

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when the sound of the military airplanes patrolling the skies of Manhattan were still traumatizing everyone, I picked up some books on bin Laden, the Middle East, and Islam. I also peppered with questions the few people I knew back then who had some expertise on the subjects. In fact, lots of people I knew were doing the same thing; we were passing around books, articles, and clippings, emailing links to each other.

This strikes me as totally unremarkable behavior. We were scared stiff, and the first thing we wanted to know - other than that the attacks had stopped for now - was what the hell was going on.

But even today, people involved in counterterrorism policy in the United States still don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.

That's right. This is still baffling to me. Not only was there a lot of pomp and ignorance going around at the time, there was also seemingly very little attempt to think about foreign policy in more intelligent terms. There were debates among friends; there were plenty of arguments and analyses by people in the know and those with even a casual bit of understanding predicting precisely what has happened in the GWOT and in Iraq. I recall hearing that the DoD department of post-war planning for Iraq consisted of two guys in a makeshift office in the Pentagon with the name of their office marked on masking tape on their door.

I don't need to say this, given the utter disaster the US has spawned, but you would really think that those ruling the US might know at least a wee bit, a modicum, a little dash, a trifle tad, a smidgen of something/anything about the country they were about to invade.