Biden Reaffirms Dem Ticket Has No Idea How Islam Works

By asserting, repeating, and defending that the Sunnis and Shiites have just been killing each other off for the past 700 years. Good thing we've got such an experienced foreign policy expert on the Democrat ticket.

Turns out the Sunnis and Shiites, while not always fans of each other, have mostly gotten along for most of the last 700 years. Under the Ottoman empire, they were united against outsiders--despite not having strong or brutal leadership out of Turkey. Their primary disagreement comes in whether it is more important to follow the current religious leadership and keep societal cohesion, or to be right--the Shiites think that they have a responsibility to overthrow or at least disobey the religious leadership if they are corrupt or incorrect, where Sunnis think that is a mandate for a widespread undermining of Islamic society. That's the base of it.

They're not different religions. They're not even different like the Catholics and Protestants. All it takes to be a Muslim is the declaration that Allah is the one true god and Mohammed is his prophet. Boom, done. Islamic states don't officially differentiate between Sunnis and Shiites, even if one is a majority--they recognize that Muslim is Muslim. Even in Sharia societies, the different approaches of Sunni and Shi'a Islam lead to surprisingly similar results. Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq got along relatively well, even before Saddam took power.

Part of the problem is that before the First World War, nation-states didn't exist in the Middle East--there were various Islamic empires, and provinces, but Islam was the organizing force in society, rather than political states. The creation of the nation-state in the Middle East made things more complicated, but most states chose whether or not to incorporate Islam (with Turkey being the only major state that didn't) into the government. But the growing strength of the nation-state meant that being a minority stuck in a bunch of arbitrary boundaries with a majority sometimes meant that the state denied you adequate protection, opportunity, or access, which led to contention. Therefore, Sunni-Shiite disparate identity led to security dilemmas. Iraq, the state with the smallest majority of either sect (in this case, Shiites hold a mere 60%) in the Middle East, has the strongest prerogative for that kind of security dilemma when the security apparatus of a country disintegrates and future resource-allocation is highly unclear.

While the Sunni-Shiite sectarian civil war should have been foreseen, that does not mean it had been happening over the past 700 years. Obama may have slipped when he said that it had, but Biden's firm repeating and defending of that position to attack McCain just simply means that he has no idea what he's talking about, despite years of experience on the Foreign Relations Committee. Luckily for Biden, being wrong has never stopped him from sticking to his guns before.

What the Heck is the Bush Doctrine?

Charlie Gibson certainly thinks he knows, and he certainly thinks it's pretty clear. In a recent interview, he ripped into her for not knowing quite what he meant. The left, by golly, is quite relieved: with Obama's poll numbers currently low enough to lose him the presidency, Democrats are rejoicing that they've got a new weakness to pick on.

Nonetheless, after seeing the interview, watching Charlie Gibson very confidently enunciated the finer details of the Bush Doctrine (that it was "anticipatory self-defense"). I listened, and thought, "wait, really?" I know a thing or two about the Bush Doctrine, and I wasn't entirely sure I agreed with Mr. Gibson. But surely, he'd done his research, and sometimes even I am wrong. Now, I do expect the Vice President of the United States to know a bit more about foreign policy than, lo, even I do.

But then I was sent an article written by the guy that first used the term. Mr. Krauthammer gave vindication to my intuition--despite Gibson's arrogance in being smarter than Palin, he was wrong for two reasons. Reason the first is that there are four separate meanings of the Bush doctrine from four different time periods, all of which have been called the "Bush Doctrine" in literature. These are:

1) Pre-9/11 unilateralism, including withdrawing from treaties;
2) Post-9/11 "if you harbor terrorists we will consider you hostile"-ism;
3) March 2002 pre-emptive defense-ism (what Gibson cited);
4) Later "aggressively spread Democracy through the world"-ism.

The last one is the one most cited and most encompassing of all of Bush's doctrinal statements. It's no wonder Governor Palin was confused when Mr. Gibson threw the phrase out there and expected her to pick up exactly what it meant. It's not quite an excuse for the level of Palin's fumbling during the foreign policy section of that particular interview, but (like most things in politics), this is nothing as it seems. And, like most things in politics, the media has again taken the position of impatient sage, and has told you and the Governor what to think.

In truth, all this reveals about the McCain ticket is its failure to market correctly. No, of course Palin is not an expert in foreign policy. No, she hasn't met with world leaders (which Gibson asked about). Why the heck would she? She's a governor, not a diplomat. Unlike Mr.'s McCain, Obama, and Biden, she has not been custom-tailoring her position as governor as a springboard, and so doesn't yet know much about foreign policy. Will she learn? Sure; Governor Clinton did, Governor Carter did (although his foreign policy was admittedly quite naive), Governor Reagan did. And for all the clamoring about John McCain's imminent departure from the earthly world, she doesn't have to be ready to fight the war-on-terror on day one, without any mentoring.

Mr. Obama himself, while running against Clinton, said that "experience is only a proxy for judgment." Those without experience will be wild cards in their decision-making. But for all their experience in foreign policy, Mr.'s Obama, Biden, and McCain lack any executive experience whatsoever. Further, have the foreign policy experiences of Mr.'s Obama and Biden culminated in proof of sound foreign policy judgment and good understanding of how to grace America's diplomatic and military might upon the world stage? More about that, later.