Sectarian Divisions Quotes

Iraq lacks leaders capable of soothing sectarian wounds, and Western attempts to pick them or force their hand invite anti-imperialist backlash.

Voters who are neither bound to the great political nor to any of the little sectarian divisions have no means of making their votes available.

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way.

As prime minister, Hariri did not directly confront Hezbollah or the Syrians, but conflict simmered nonetheless.

The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.

Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.

… the obstacles to union in the main are ideals, symbols, pretenses or pretensions, and prejudices: and no one who knows Irish human nature will underrate their stubbornness.

Some Iraqi troops aren't willing to fight for their government. But many Shiites appear willing to fight for their religious leaders.

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

I'm not a dispensationalist - I don't believe in the Rapture. I think it's an unbiblical doctrine, and in North American Christianity, at least, it is the teaching that is the root of much of our subculturalism.

If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.

Once started, religious strife has a tendency to go on and on - to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility.

There are people who haven't faced the reality of what has gone on in Iraq. They still think that the old central state is going to be put back together again. It's not going to happen in Kurdistan. It's not going to happen in the south. It's not going to happen in Baghdad.

The progress in Iraq is still fragile. And it could still be reversed. Iraq still faces innumerable challenges, and they will be evident during what will likely be a difficult process as the newly elected Council of Representatives selects the next prime minister, president, and speaker of the council.

It is even more so when it comes to Iraq, which is a large Arab country with scientific, material, and human resources and is able to accomplish, at the least, what Lebanon accomplished, and more.

When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity - what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship with ethnic and sectarian divisions. When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.

The conflict in the Middle East is complex, multi-faceted, and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

The Middle East was not always convulsed by sectarian bloodletting. For a long time it was a place where minorities coexisted with the Muslim Faith, inhabiting this world far more peacefully than they do today.

Historically, the Middle East was governed by Empires. The empires drew the lines between nations without paying attention to the ethnicity of the peoples in the nations. Now, you don’t have a single country that is cohesive in the Middle East. For that reason, you see civil wars all over the place.

Leaders of the various Iraqi elements will likely have their own militias, and there will be endless rounds of brinkmanship on the road to post-Islamic State boundaries, governing structures, and distribution of power and resources.

Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help?

It's easy to say, let's go in and get the bad guys. But you have a divided country of Sunnis and Shias. The United States goes and takes action there on behalf of the Iraqi government. You've got Iran coming in and saying we're going to stand with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, so now we're aligning ourselves with Iran, and if we do air strikes, becoming de facto air force for them.

Look at all the conflict between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies, because they provide the sense of separateness on which their collective egoic identity depends.

There isn't any air power in the world that can take care of the problem of sectarian divisions.