The Kurds are the only hope for any kind of stability on the Middle East.
It is critical that if Iraq cannot get rid of Iranian militias, we have to arm and recognize Kurdistan as an independent country.
Iraq is 2/3 shiite. Some of Shia Islam’s holiest sites are in Southern Iraq. Many in Southern Iraq religiously and culturally identify with Iran. There was a reason Saddam brutally suppressed the Shia in Iraq.
The US invasion broke open those flood-gates. Bush made US policy and soldiers hostage to Iran’s whims.
I am 100% on board with a free Kurdistan. They have fought long and hard to simply defend themselves from practically everyone around them. I have tremendous respect for them.
The majority of Shiite in Iraq are Arab, not Persian like Iran. They share a branch of Islam but are in other ways culturally distinct.
What is common between Iran and Iraq are the Shiite fundamentalists, in Iraq in the form of militias and merely in the religious sense as well.
But is hard to tell, other than Shiite militias (mostly all of the fundamentalist variety) how much of the non-militia Shiite Iraqis are fundamentalist or not. Iraqis of evrery stripe, Sunni, Shiite or other have generally been more secular minded than the Iranian Shiite fundamentalists. The other thing that seems evident is the Shiite politicians seem to be either fundamentalist in the majority, or a majority kowtow to the fundamentalists in their ranks (maybe they fear the militias).
The Shiite historical memory in Iraq has one other piece they never forget. At one time, after most all of Persia and most of Mesopotamia was of the Shiite sect, the Wahabi Sunni invaded from Arabia (1802-1805) and nearly took the Shiite holy city of Karbala - about 100 miles southwest of Baghdad. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts between the Shiite and the Sunni and one the Shiite, Arab or Persian, do not forget. It is part of what still cements the sectarian enmity between the sects.
That is all true, but from the Wahabi Sunni view it was Ottoman control in Mesopotamia they were attacking, and not as a sectarian attack against the Shiites there. Don’t ever expect Persian or Arab Shiite fundamentalists to view it that way. And don’t ever expect the Wahabi Sunni of Arabia to admit it was not an attack on Shiites in particular.
Their blood feuds continue today in proxy wars across the Middle East.
Voice of America is a US government propaganda service that was created during the Cold War to propagandize foreign countries. Outrageously, Congress and Obama overturned a long standing law that prohibited the government from directing propaganda at a domestic audience. Now we have direct government propaganda polluting the media.
Conservatives need to demand the law against domestic government propaganda be reinstated.