It is my fault for listening too much to punditry about Iraq from people who are treating it as flavor of the month but who know about as much about it as they know about every other flavor of the month on which they write, which is to say next to nothing. I suppose experts on gun violence are as justifiably frustrated by punditry on Trayvon Martin, or experts on Ukraine, or anyone else.  Lots of opinions, based on next to no knowledge. But such is our world.

Still, it would be nice if the pundits might want to avoid some of the excessive hyperbole attending to their statements.  Specifically, there is a sizable difference between these two positions.

1. There remains a considerable problem of race in American society. Blacks remain economically more disadvantaged, profiling remains a significant issue, and nearly a quarter of black men end up entangled in criminal proceedings during their lives.  Blacks and whites therefore live very different existences in the United States, culturally, politically, economically and sociologically.

2. There is no such thing as the United States of America. Nobody believes in it, has any feeling for it.  It’s a sickly sad state, as ripe for dismemberment as the English empire that lived before it.

The first seems self evident, the second false, and risible to anyone even mildly patriotic and American.  The same is true for Sunni and Shi’a, and the state of Iraq, mutatis mutandis.  While it is true that the Shi’a Sunni divisions are more serious than anything relating to race in America, that is an evasion of, rather than any sort of limitation on, my central point–namely, the statement that people don’t get along as well as they should, or that one group is marginalized and another is empowered, is quite different from suggesting there is no national feeling, or the nation does not deserve to exist.  There are very few Iraqis beyond the Kurdish region (separate case, one inapplicable to this diatribe) who feel that way.  And most of us are offended to repeatedly heard it said.

So, in sum, my dear pundits, if you say that we in Iraq have a Sunni Shi’a problem we have not done enough to address, and that it has exposed the state to grave danger, to inexcusable weakness, and to an army that is proving itself pathetic in battling an enemy it vastly outnumbers, then I say you state the obvious, and have little to add to the discussion. But if you say there is no such thing as “Iraq”, and no feeling for that entity, then, respectfully, you probably don’t know a whole lot of Iraqis, because most of them would describe such a position as idiotic.  Suggest you meet some and talk to them, before putting pen to paper.

HAH