The following is from a CQ interview with the incoming Democrat chair of the House Intelligence Committee:
Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”
“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.
Trust me, Reyes’ answers to the impromptu CQ quiz just gets worse. And he’s not alone. Consider this:
Only six people in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad are fluent in Arabic,
according to last week’s report of the Iraq Study Group. Only about two
dozen of the embassy’s thousand employees have some familiarity with
the language, the report said.… Rare is the military unit with an American soldier who can read a
captured document or interrogate a prisoner, my own sources tell me.
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