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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (128798)	4/9/2004 3:47:49 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Bill Ulrich; Re: "Sunni Triangle is about 2% of the 25,000,000." This is far, far, far from true, LOL. Re: "Seems like the base consideration of 25,000,000 oughta be reduced to better reflect who's really trying to kill us and who isn't even considering it." The 5% figure is an average figure that applies to populations more or less as heterogeneous as Iraq. Every nation has minorities. For example, Japan has the Ainu, and Germany had numerous minorities (a lot of whom they gassed). The way to get in trouble with using numbers like this is to keep trimming the figures in favor of what it is that you want to believe, without simultaneously adjusting the counter figures. As an example, Vietnam's population was 15% non Vietnamese, and most of the non Vietnamese were, as you put it, "happy campers". In fact, a lot of the Hmong got resettled in the US. Another large percentage of Vietnam's population were Catholics who also supported the US (and supplied most of the rulers of South Vietnam). And the percentage of the population that was Bhuddist were hardly big US haters. And for that matter, we were also having to fight Cambodians and Laotians. To hope that the Shiites won't fight when we massacre Sunnis is silly. The Shiites have a hell of a lot more in common with the Sunni than they do with us. Furthermore, it's already been demonstrated that the Shiites are rather patriotic. Iran knew that the Shiites hated Saddam but were rather surprised to discover that when they invaded southern Iraq, the Shiite civilians shot the crap out of them. To learn more about the history of that fascinating war, read "The Longest War": amazon.com Go read the Iraqi bloggers. Sure there are differences between Shiites and Sunni, but the two groups speak the same language (as opposed to the Kurds), and are widely intermarried. Blood runs thicker than water. -- Carl