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.

An Inkling of Democratic Thought?

Talked to a few coworkers at lunch today, and they asked me, among other things, about American views of the Iraq War, the structure of American Government, and American Elections (they were more surprised than I'd think they would be that Americans are "angry" about Iraq). In case anyone's curious, I didn't say most of this in Chinese, it was a bit beyond me.

Anyway.

When I got to talking about elections, they got pretty excited. These three, at least, follow the US elections pretty closely, and are rooting for the Democratic party because they think the Democrats will be "nicer to China." I am not quite sure how true that would be, given the Democrats' postition on imports/tariffs/"jobs," etc, but it's up in the air which party would try to beat on China harder.

Anyway.

The interesting part of this all, of course, was we started talking about Chinese village-level elections, and how my three unnamed friends secretly hoped that someday, democracy would come to China. They said "there's nothing we can do," and predicted that it would take decades--probably after they died.

I provided a devil's advocacy of the position, mentioning the village-level, city, and experimental provincial-governor-level elections. If these do become widespread (and the trend is upward, and the Party supports it), there may be some unintended consequences for the Party. While every candidate must be approved by the Party, there is a potential for divergence. If every provincial-and-lower election has two candidates, they are likely to polarize to some degree (by Duverger's Law). For example: in a Shanghai election, there may be a candidate supported by Labor, and one by Business... this may happen in Chengdu, Beijing... and if this becomes persistent, if there emerges a common thread that divides two candidates in each city, province, village, then they may begin to try to support each other. A Pro-Business Mayor may support a Pro-Business village-head, etc. Then you've got organization, and then you've got quasi-Parties. And as long as they keep pretending to be the Communist Party, there's not much that can be done (in the sortof passive-aggressive tradition of Chinese politics).

Then, China would be one bold stroke, one schism, one terrible argument away from a two-party system. Then, like Taiwan, like Korea, the whole dictatorial system would come crashing down.

But that's the optimistic perspective... there are others. And even this would take decades. But the trend is good, and there is hope. As long as people keep secretly wanting democracy, as long as they quietly and cleverly express their desires and their criticisms, as long as the proxies past the Great Firewall keep working, as long as the Sino-US travel keeps increasing, ideas will flow, and spread. The CCP can stop people from talking, but they can't stop people from thinking, even if it is just an inkling of Democratic thought.