Know your wogs

Update: Ed Brayton has now acknowledged the non-triviality of his original error. Bravo! A gentleman he is.
End Update:

Today, Ed Brayton has post where he comments on an article about Saudi ties to Sunnis in Iraq, etc. The article itself isn't interesting to me really, but what Ed did say about it caught my attention:

That could spark a regional war with the two largest and most powerful Arab nations [Saudi Arabia and Iran], not to mention the world's top 2 oil producers, on opposite sides.

There are some factual issues here. 95% of Iranians are not Arabs. The largest number are Persian, speaking Farsi, an Indo-European language which is more closely related to English than Arabic. The Turkish ambassador in Vienna once offered that the locals (Germans) "spoke Farsi." A large minority of Iranians, including the current Supreme Leader, are ethnic Azeris, a Turkic group which was instumental in the creation of a Shia Iranian state in the 16th century. There are other assorted groups like Kurds, Balouch, Turkomans, and yes, Arabs, to round out the balance. Second, Saudia Arabia is not one of the two largest Arab countries if you define it as population. Egypt is the most populous and culturally most influential Arab state, with Cairo being the New York and London of the Arab world. Even including Saudi Arabia's large non-citizen population (millions and millions), Algeria is more populous.

Two trivial mistakes you say? So sayeth Ed:

Okay, so Iran is Persian, not Arab. That has precisely nothing to do with the substance of this post. And I think Migeulito got it right, if Saudi Arabia gets involved it will likely be by funding Syria and providing diplomatic cover via their ties to the US for their actions.

I was somewhat displeased by this sort of response, so I posted a lengthy comment. Not only did Ed seem to believe that it was a trivial error to assume that Iran was Arab, but he offered up another implausible scenario, the use of Syria as a proxy by Saudi Arabia against the Iraqi Shia and Iran.

Let me explain. To Ed the fact that Iran is not Arab or Arab might seem non-trivial, seeing as how he is focused on the common Shia identity of Iranians and Iraq Shia. But the fact that Iran is not an Arab country is assumed to be very salient by most observers. Some have contended that the Iranian state's hyper-hostility toward Israel is in part posturing in front of the Arab world to prove its bonafides in the great cause of the Arab nations, the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs. During the Iran-Iraq War the Iraqi army was predominantly Shia in the ranks. During a counter-offensive in the mid-80s the Iranian government assumed that Shia southern Iraq would welcome them as liberators. But it wasn't so, rather, the Shia army and citizenry dug in in Basra and the Iranian army was not able to conquer the city and so proceed toward central Iraq. The assumption here is that despite the Shia fellow feeling on the religious plane, ethnic difference remained which meant that the Iranians could not take their Arab co-religionists for granted. A few years back Moqtada al-Sadr burnished his credentials in part by offering a contrast with the Iranian born ayatollah Ali Sistani, who still speaks Arabic with a Persian accent. These fissures would be totally unpredicted if one assumed that Iran was an Arab nation, because there would be no potential cleavage that one could predict based on language and ethnic identity. In other words, I do think it speaks to the plausibility of the argument Ed is making.

Now, let's move to the second point, the use of Syria as a proxy by Saudi Arabia. Some facts

1) Syria is ruled by the Assad family
2) The Assads, and much of the military elite, are Alawites
3) The Alawites were declared Ithna Ashari Shia in the 1970s by a Lebanese ayatollah, but traditionally their classification as Muslims, let alone Shia, has been somewhat problematic. They practice a religion steeped in mystery which likely exhibits quasi-Christian tendencies, not surprising since Alawites dominate the western regions of Syria where Jacobite Christianity has deep roots
4) Syria is majority Sunni
5) Saudi Arabia is a Salafist state which takes a narrow view of "who is a Muslim?"
6) Syria has long had an alliance with Iran, dating back to the Shah, but solidifying during the Iran-Iraq War

Note that ayatollah Khomeini's standing with Sunni fundamentalists plunged when he was silent about the events of the Hama Massacre, where Syrian Islamists were slaughtered by the Alawite dominated regime. The idea that Saudi Arabia would use Syria as a proxy against Iran is rendered far less plausible (though nothing is impossible) precisely by the structural conditions I note above. On the most recent bloggingheads.tv Mickey Kaus offered the opinion that Syria is a Sunni regime, so why would they cooperate with the Iranians? Mickey should stick to commenting on domestic policy, though Syria is mostly Sunni, it is ruled by notional Shia, and has had a long standing alliance with Iran as I note above. Facts matter in weighting the plausibility of various conclusions.

This is not a limited problem. Today pundits, and bloggers, often speak about things they have imperfect knowledge of. You do it, I do we it, we all do it. A few months ago I commented about Azeris on this blog and Jeff Boulier responded:

Provoking Azeris against Persians (or Persians against Azeris -- look at how they are hogging the best jobs!) may be difficult, but I guess I attach a higher barrier to "implausible" than you do. Kurds and Arabs offer better opportunities.

I'm certainly not a scholar of Azeris, but I do know more than the typical person. Whose ascertainment of a given probability here is more credible, Boulier's or mine? I saw no evidence on that thread that he knew anything about the topic at hand, but that didn't stop him from having an opinion, likely based on his political affiliations. We live in the world of "Opinions differ," even when the disparate opinions are differently informed. I wish Boulier had admitted he didn't know jack about the topic, but that was OK, he was going to support his own political group because that's what he did . A friend of mine was IMing me and asked, "How do we convince people about Iraq?" (the detail of what to convince was irrelevant, we didn't even agree, we were just frustrated by the lack of fruit in discourse on this topic). I responded that it wasn't going to happen through verbal persuasion, we'd have to let the chips fall into place. I've experienced many a time when I have made a historically informed argument (though not scholarly mind you, simply not based on pure opinion) on a foreign policy related issue, and a reader has responded, "I don't know if I agree with that." My only response is that usually one must put the bold on I don't know. Most people don't really know much history or geography, so their heuristics are very rough and imprecise. Their opinions are worthless, on most topics, to anyone but themselves.