The following article appeared in the Washington Post on Monday, December 20, 2004.
In Iraq: One Religion, Two Realities Sunni, Shiite Sermons Leave No Room for Dialogue on Election or Insurgents By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service A key excerpt from the article is shown below and provides a sense of what the majority Shia and Kurds (80% of Iraq's population) think, when compared with the minority Sunnis (20%) who have dominated and controlled Iraq for 35 years through armed force and brutal repression. This should put some perspective on the increasingly strident and insulting comments of a small but desperate cabal of Goanetters who are trying to describe the liberation of Iraq from the tyranny of the minority Sunnis, as an illegal act precipitated by the lies of the American administration: In Um al-Qura, built by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as the Mother of All Battles Mosque, the insurgency is celebrated as an act of resistance against a faithless and deceitful American occupier. In no less strident rhetoric, at the venerated Baratha mosque, that same insurgency is condemned as wicked and senseless violence waged by loyalists of Hussein and foreigners. Elections are subjugation at the Sunni sermon, liberation at the Shiite one. And at each, the community's patience, the preachers insist, is wearing dangerously thin after yet another provocation or slight.