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.

Dissecting the Iran Election

I am often told of a power struggle within Iran; at least the secular part of it. There is evidence of it; Iranian shifts in Iraq policy and shifts in strength of anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment show that such is clear. Iranian students are often lauded to be more pro-Western and moderate than their parents, defying Iranian dress code law by cutting their hair close and wearing ties. In the late 1990's and early 2000s, moderate reformers swept into power, and in 2004 lost it.

After this election, the conservative/reformist split of seating seems to have not changed much, despite the fact that the cleric-led Guardian Council banned most of the reformist opposition from running due to insufficient loyalty to Islam (that same Guardian Council is calling the election a "Victory Against the West"). But among the conservatives, a fissure is growing. A faction of conservatives is rallying against Ahmadinejad's hard-line stances, which they say are bringing UN sanctions, as well as Iran's faltering economy, suffering from high inflation and unemployment.


The reformers might have done better, had President Bush not encouraged Iranians to boycott; his words likely inflamed Iran's sense of nationalism and anti-Americanism.

The EU and US have condoned the election as unfair due to the banning of reformer candidates, though the protests will go no further than that, and Iran's parliament will press on, functional, for the next four years.

Reformers are also calling this vote a victory, given that they held on to most of the seats they had despite many of the men and women who had campaigned for seats were blocked.

The interesting part will not be what the reformers do, but what the opposition conservatives do. Ahmadinejad is in for a tough next year; presidential elections occur in 2009, and a few conservatives are looking to lead their faction towards a presidential victory, beating out Ahmadinejad.

It should be noted that not all right-wing religious fanatics are the same. While not reformers, these conservatives are likely to do more looking inward, concentrating on economic reform and strengthening cultural and religious unity. What Iraq policy the anti-Ahmadinejad conservatives hold is unknown to me, but it is likely to change.

The US public won't see much in the way of immediate changes from this election, but Ahmadinejad may be forced to make foreign policy concessions; look closely for subtle changes in rhetoric and action in Iran's foreign policy in the next few months. I'll keep my eye on what's to come.