Incurious George Is An Embarrasment To Party And Nation

A fair bit of bandwidth has been taken up today by blog reports about claims by former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, that Bush was unaware of the existence of two sects of Islam - Sunni and Shia - as late as a couple of months before the invasion of Iraq. Galbraith uses the anecdote as an example of a "culture of arrogance that pervaded the whole administration" which meant that there was a belief that the invasion and occupation of Iraq "could be accomplished with minimal effort and planning by the United States and that it was not important to know something about Iraq."

Well, the charge of arrogance leading to incompetence is one that has been rightly levelled at the Bush administration on more than one occasion and over more than just the Iraqi adventure - but this particular anecdote seems to be the wrong one to illustrate it with.

One of James Joyner's commenters points to two 2002 speeches by Bush - one a key speech at the UN in Sepetember of that year, in which he uses the terms Shia and Sunni, which would strongly suggest he had been briefed on the difference between the two by then.
We can perhaps debate whether he truly understood what his speechwriters made him say but there's no uncertainty that "unaware of the existence" is a phrase too far.

For me, there is far more of interest in what Dr. Joyner himself wrote before his commenter found those earlier speeches.

While I don’t doubt the central thesis that Bush is not particularly intellectually curious, it’s almost inconceivable that anyone–let alone a man whose father was CIA Director, Vice President, and President–would not at least be aware of something so basic.

I find it highly significant that Dr. Joyner - an intelligent, moderate, conservative who almost certainly voted for Bush twice and someone we can safely assume speaks for a large part of the non-neocon Right - finds such a thing "almost inconceivable" but not entirely and actually inconceivable purely because Bush is not particularly intellectually curious.

Talk about damning with faint praise!

If even the moderates of his own party have such a low opinion of Dubya as to have such a level of doubt about his mental capacity to do any job, let alone that of President and Most Powerful man In The World, then we really are into territory where Bush is more of a drag than a plus for most Republicans...and for America.