John Mccain Sunni Shiite

There should be real questions about whether McCain -- as well as his foreign policy team -- has any knowledge of US-Iranian relations.

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, John McCain admitted to me that he hadn't voted for George Bush.

Selecting Condoleezza Rice as a running mate would thwart any attempt by McCain to have his campaign be defined by something other than Iraq.

His mistakes would prevent McCain from getting a job as a research assistant at any think tank in D.C., let alone delivering anything resembling a responsible foreign policy as president.

It only makes sense that the media have focused non-stop on the looming threat of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago while paying scant attention to the fact that the presumptive Republican nominee for president apparently doesn't have a clue about what's going on in the Middle East. And with the U.S. death toll hitting 4,000, John McCain's tenuous grasp on what is happening in the region becomes all the more worthy of attention. READ MORE John McCain, Iraq, and the Eyewitness Fallacy: John McCain's glowing post-visit assessment of conditions in Iraq, and Hillary Clinton's hyperbolically harrowing recollections of her 1996 trip to Bosnia both stand as shining examples of what the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge dubbed "the eyewitness fallacy." In a brilliant essay, Muggeridge described public figures of strong conviction throughout history -- many of them greatly admired and well-meaning -- who, in eyewitness accounts, saw what they wanted to see, and became what they wanted to be. READ MORE

For a man who stakes his credibility on military affairs, to be unaware of the difference between Sunni and Shiite is unthinkable