Just read this OpEd piece in the New York Times (via Lex) about how some Congresscritters who sit on committees that oversee critical aspects of the war on terrorism don’t know their Shiite…or Sunnis.  From the piece:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy
interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a
fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a
Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your
enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds.
And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for
theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today,
and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British
counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the
difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but
far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing
out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq
into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by
Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states…

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican
who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on
technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment:
“One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest
with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion,
different families or something.”

 

To his credit, he
asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the
schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how
Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim
world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he
replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over
there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

As Lex says, "Ya think?" 

Man, we’re in trouble.