What Every American Should Know About the Middle East

This blog post has a succinct writeup of important things you should know about the Middle East. Even if you’re reasonably well-informed, odds are there’s something new there. A couple of things that I had forgotten:

• Arabs are Semites, as they speak a Semitic language
• Iranians are Shia Muslims, but they are not Arabs. They are Persians.

Also, an important thing to remember if you find yourself starting a war in the Middle East:

[Iraq is] mostly Shia (roughly 60%), but under Saddam the Shia were oppressed and the Sunni were in power despite being only 20% of the population.

As GWB said when he was told in 2003 that an invasion could cause a civil war between Sunni and Shia: “I thought they were all Muslims!”