Cheney With An Accent

I only heard a snippet of this as I was walking out the door, but did Tony Blair actually tell Brian Williams in an interview that the Shiites and Sunnis mainly get along except for a few agitators? Did he really explain away 1400 years of animosity and statements from Sunnis that Shiites are "worse than the Jews"?

If so, then Blair has truly taken neocon fantasyland beliefs to heart. He may have done good for Northern Ireland, but in the Middle East, he's simply living in a different world.

UPDATE: Confirmed, he really did say that.

While an interview this long will have to play out over several days and several of our broadcasts, the headlines from our discussion were these: his decision to step down was years in the making; he says he would do it all again the same way, even knowing what we now know about Iraq -- where he says the situation is not a civil war -- in fact, Blair contends most Sunnis and Shiites get along, but for an agitated minority.

UPDATE II: You may remember the last neocon moron to claim that the Sunnis and Shiites were BFF. But at least Bill Kristol said it in April 2003 and didn't have four more years worth of indisputable evidence.

"I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni, or the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq has always been very secular."

I knew England as a whole was a bit behind the times in fashion and such, but you would have thought this would have penetrated 10 Downing Street.