Ted Cruz's Ignorance of Basic Facts About Iran Echoes Bush Administration's Ignorance About Iraq

A viral moment on Tucker Carlson's podcast is a throwback to the Bush era.

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

By now you probably have seen Tucker Carlson’s viral interview with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

In that interview, Cruz appears to know basically nothing about the country of Iran — despite the fact that he is spending every day of the week advocating for America to invade the country.

(A country I may add poses zero threat to the United States, unless we are dumb enough to invade it.)

I mean that literally. Cruz admits he has no idea what the population of Iran is. He also can’t name the ethnic groups that populate the country. He is in favor of toppling the government there but he has no idea what will come next.

Carlson’s interview won wide praise across the political spectrum, including from people who are far from fans of the former Fox News host. I’ve often thought that the most hawkish people America seem to have next to no knowledge of the countries they want to blow to smithereens, especially when it’s countries that are distant from our actual interests and where there is no justification for invading. Carlson finally put my theory to the test.

But Cruz isn’t the first hawk who displayed stunning ignorance of a country he wants to invade. When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq and remake its government, it set in motion a civil war that ended up claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. This was predictable if you knew anything about the sectarian divisions in the country. But the administration was unfamiliar with the basic facts about Iraq.

Peter Galbraith, a senior diplomat, later explained in his book The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, that Bush himself didn’t even know there was such a thing as Sunni and Shia Muslims:

A year after the Axis of Evil Speech, President Bush with met three Iraqi Americans: the author Kanan Makiya; Hatem Mukhlis, a doctor; and Rend Rahim, who late became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. As the three described what they thought would be the political situation after Saddam’s fall, they talked about Sunnis and Shiites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms. The three spent part of the meeting explaining that there are two major sects in Islam.

So two months before he ordered U.S. troops into the country, the president of the United States did not appear to know about the divisions among Iraqis that has defined the country’s history and politics. He would not have understood why non-Arab Iran might gain a foothold in post-Saddam Iraq. He could not have anticipated U.S. troops being caught in the middle of a civil war between two religious sects that he did not know existed.

Galbraith’s telling was echoed by many who worked on the post-invasion Iraq. The administration had no idea what it was getting into.

Thankfully, history never repeats itself. Right?