Wrong holy cities?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but it's things like this which make me question the reliability of briefings presented to the US administration. From a February 2003 DoD press release:

Wolfowitz: First of all, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. We won't need troops in Saudi Arabia when there's no longer an Iraqi threat. The Saudi problem will be transformed. In Iraq, first of all the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory. They are totally different situations. But the most fundamental difference is that, let me put it this way. We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq.
There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.

At the time, he apparently hadn't been briefed on Karbala:

KARBALA, Iraq (CNN) -- Crowds of Shia Muslims Wednesday chanted and danced in the streets of this holy city on the final day of a pilgrimage long suppressed under Saddam Hussein's rule...
Karbala is where Muslim martyr Imam Hussein bin Ali -- grandson of the prophet Mohammed -- was killed and entombed more than 1,300 years ago.

Or Najaf:

U.S. tanks rumbled Friday into a vast cemetery in the southern city of Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's most sacred places, in pursuit of insurgents loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fighting, which coincided with skirmishes in the other major Shiite holy city, Karbala, demonstrated some of the most aggressive tactics yet employed by U.S. forces against Sadr's Shiite militia.

Did someone forget to do their homework to check if the Shiites had holy cities too?