FASCINATING ANALYSIS

You simply must read all of this.

The problem is that the "supervisory class" in Iraq has been, for centuries, largely Sunni...

You have plenty of entrepreneurs in Iraq, but a real shortage of modern, reliable managers...

Most of the guys who know modern management techniques are Sunnis, and often former (or even current) Baath Party members. Since Saddam took over, guess who was favored when it came to college admissions, or study overseas?

If you let too many Sunnis back into the management positions, guess who is going to have a great deal of control over the country, way out of proportion to their numbers? ...

Nearly all the violence in Iraq is coming from the twenty percent of the population that are Sunni Arabs.

Thousands of violent Sunnis have been arrested and interrogated and it’s pretty clear from those interrogations that the violence in Iraq comes from several sources. There are the members of Saddam’s security and intelligence organizations carrying out a pre-war plan for creating violence and disorder if Iraq is occupied. There are also many Sunni Arabs acting on their own to oppose those foreigners who would allow the majority Shia and Kurds to rule the nation. And then there were the foreign fighters, who saw Saddam as a great Arab hero and the Sunni Arab cause worthy of support...

Iraq has another problem that soldiers and reconstruction workers have to deal with. There’s a tendency to allow emotions, rather than logic and analysis, drive Iraqi public opinion and policy making. Rumors and the most outrageous stories spread rapidly and are readily believed. This is actually quite common throughout the Arab world...

In the Arab world (and many other parts of the world as well), the party line, and a desire for the most exciting and shocking spin on a story, come first.

This kind of journalism makes the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government into a great tragedy. It leads to inventing an endless litany of fictional American “atrocities” against Iraq.

At the same time, the dozens of Iraqi torture videos discovered in Iraq, showing Saddam’s secret police at work, were rarely broadcast by Arab media outside Iraq. These videos were very popular inside Iraq, but foreign Arab news organizations shunned them because the reality of Saddam's atrocities did not agree with the fantasy of Saddam the Arab hero that these news outfits were pushing.

Actually, the disconnect between reality and Arab news organizations (especially satellite news outfits al Jazeera and al Arabia) has become so great that Iraqis (according to a recent survey) are switching more to local TV stations....

Truth is not an abstract, lack of it can kill in places like Iraq.