BF2S Forums Democrats, what are you like? talk about embarrasing yourselves..

usmarine2007 wrote:

if you ask most politicians in either party, they would have no clue either.

the article wrote:

Congressman Terry Everett, a Republican and vice-chairman of the House intelligence sub-committee on technical and tactical intelligence, chuckled when he was asked the same question.

"One's in one location, another's in another location," he said. "No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something."

When Mr Stein outlined the difference, which dates back to the death of the Prophet Mohammed in AD632, Mr Everett said: "Now that you've explained it to me, what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area."

Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis, a Republican who oversees the CIA's recruiting of Islamic spies, was also stumped when asked if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shia. "Do I? You know, I should. It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."

article wrote:

In a similar gaffe-laden session, Willie Hulon, chief of the FBI's national security branch, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shia either. "The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following," he said. "And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following."

So which were Iran and Hizbollah? With a 50 per cent chance of getting it right, Mr Hulon flunked by plumping for Sunni.

Only six people in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic, according to last week’s report of the Iraq Study Group. Only about two dozen of the embassy’s thousand employees have some familiarity with the language, the report said.