{"id":4374,"date":"2008-10-03T14:11:29","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T19:11:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=4374"},"modified":"2008-10-03T14:11:29","modified_gmt":"2008-10-03T19:11:29","slug":"reidar-visser-biden%e2%80%99s-700-years-and-the-dangerous-road-to-a-%e2%80%9csettlement%e2%80%9d-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=4374","title":{"rendered":"Reidar Visser: Biden\u2019s 700 Years and the Dangerous Road to a \u201cSettlement\u201d in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Reidar Visser (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.historiae.org\">www.historiae.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>3 October 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>During yesterday\u2019s vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden repeated the basic thrust of Barack Obama\u2019s comments on Iraq one week ago. According to Biden, \u201cJohn McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shiites got along with each other without reading the history of the last 700 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other words, Barack Obama\u2019s apparent assumption of an endless conflict between Sunnis and Shiites Iraq was more than a slip of the tongue. Instead this seems to constitute a key ingredient in the Democratic narrative on Iraq: the country can be held together only by a strong ruler, otherwise Shiites and Sunnis would be at each other\u2019s throats. Biden\u2019s incarnation of the argument also served to clarify that Democrats quite literally are thinking of hundreds of years when they advance this contention; by his counting, the problems began in the early fourteenth century. That is certainly a slightly odd place to start, since Baghdad at the time was governed by Mongol rulers who themselves were rather difficult to label, sometimes they were pro-Shiite, sometimes pro-Sunni. At any rate, even if the exact number of centuries in this case may be attributable to a Biden idiosyncrasy, the main point is clear. Democrats do not think Shiites and Sunnis have any tradition of coexistence in Iraq. <\/p>\n<p><strong>[<a href=\"http:\/\/www.historiae.org\/biden-palin.asp\">Read the analysis<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org) 3 October 2008 During yesterday\u2019s vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden repeated the basic thrust of Barack Obama\u2019s comments on Iraq one week ago. According to Biden, \u201cJohn McCain was saying the Sunnis and Shiites got along with &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=4374\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-18y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4375,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4374\/revisions\/4375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}