- Anatol Lieven
The competition is stiff, but I think Wolfowitz pretty much has the kebab prize tied up. I was already willing to award it to him when he got into a fight with chief of the Army Shineski over how many peacekeeping troops would be needed:
> Mr. Wolfowitz took issue with the contention [that 100,000 troops might
> be needed to keep peace -- a number that at the moment is looking rather
> thin], noting that Iraq had none of the ethnic strife that has
> characterized other regional conflicts where US troops have been used,
> such as the Balkans.
But this one is even better:
<quote>
Religious Shiite parties and militias in Iraq have recently stepped into the gap resulting from the collapse of the Baath Party, especially in the sacred shrine cities. This development must have come as a shock to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who in early March preferred Iraqis as US allies to Saudis, saying that they are secular and "overwhelmingly Shia, which is different from the Wahhabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory."
<unquote>
Must be a real shock to him watching Shias converge on Karbala and cut their heads open. Wonder if anyone's told him yet that most of the Shia holy cities are in Iraq.
The quote is from the April 22nd Middle East Report Online by Juan Cole
URL: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero042203.html
which is quite worth reading for a patient sum-up of the various Iraqi Shia factions by someone who is more than an instant expert.
Michael