Gary Hart: "suppose Bush had read and knew something about....the region" [View All]

Gary Hart: No Child Left Behind

For all but the perversely ignorant, it should be apparent by now that America suffers when it elects leaders who choose not to read. I say "choose" because, whatever else may or may not have happened there, somewhere between Yale and Harvard surely George W. Bush learned how to read. But he seems to have chosen not to. Had he chosen to read, current events could well have turned out much better.
Take for example the second chapter in Stephen Kinzer's very important book All the Shah's Men. This chapter is a brilliant essay on the history of Persia, Islam, and modern Iran set in the context of a larger, dismaying story of how the U.S. overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh led directly to the age of terror, the confrontation between the West and fundamentalist Islam, and the unnecessary Iraqi quagmire.

Being men of intelligence, matched only by their arrogance, the neoconservatives surely knew this history but, in the interest of American empire in the Middle East, chose to ignore it. But suppose George W. Bush had read and knew something about the rich, complex and turbulent history of the region, of the rise and fall of Persia, of the cultural and religious tides and typhoons, of the post-632 Islamic chasm. He might then have asked questions of his neoconservative wise men: "Aren't Shiites only ten percent of Muslims?", he might have said, "and aren't Persians different from Arabs?" "Didn't those divisions go back a long way," turning to Mr. Wolfowitz, "and didn't that have something to do with the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980?" "Why were we supporting Iraq," he turns to Don, "while we were selling arms to the Iranians?" "And, Richard, explain to me exactly why the U.S. would want to try to occupy Iraq, even under your friend President Chalabi, when we know how disastrously the British occupation failed?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/no-child-left-behind_b_50421.html