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Iraq's conflict is fueling a bitter Mideast split

By Amin Saikal
International Herald Tribune
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2005

Iraq's conflict is fueling a bitter Mideast split The
division between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq could
cause wider sectarian hostilities across the Muslim
world, with a devastating impact on the region and
beyond.

CANBERRA, Australia: The wider consequences of the
Iraq conflict are unfolding, but not in the way that
the United States and its allies had expected. While
stability, security and consolidated democracy
continue to elude the Iraqis, an alarming outcome
looming on the horizon is the sharpening of the
historical division between the two main sects of
Islam in the region: Sunnis and Shiites.

The traditional power equation in the Gulf is rapidly
shifting in favor of Shiite Islam, which has a
majority of followers in only three Middle Eastern
countries - Iraq, Bahrain and Iran - and whose
leadership is claimed by Iran. This has deeply
concerned the regional Arab states, especially Saudi
Arabia, which champions the cause of Sunni Islam that
is dominant in most Muslim countries.

If the present trend continues, the Iraq conflict
could cause wider sectarian hostilities across the
Muslim world, with a devastating impact on the region
and beyond.

Historically, Iraq has had an Arab national identity
but a majority Shiite population, ruled by a
succession of minority Sunni-dominated elites. The
U.S.-led invasion, and Washington's aim of installing
a protégé government without affecting Iraq's Arab
identity, changed all this.

The Sunnis' loss of political power drove many of
their elements to join forces with Islamic extremists
to mount a formidable resistance, preventing
Washington from transforming Iraq and the region in
the U.S. image. As result, the Bush administration has
become increasingly dependent on its traditional
minority Kurdish allies and responsive to the Shiite
majority in Iraq as the best way of defeating the
resistance.

In the process, however, America failed to see that
its approach could also achieve what it had never
intended: the empowerment of Iraq's Shiites and the
diluting of Iraq's national identity, which had
historically been forged within the Sunni-dominated
Arab world.

The first development unquestionably strengthened the
position of Iran, given the close sectarian ties
between the two sides at both leadership and popular
levels. This, together with Iran's support of the
Lebanese Shiites in Hezbollah and its close political
relationship with Damascus, has now given rise to a
Shiite-dominated strategic entity, enabling Tehran to
influence not only the course of events in Iraq but
also the geostrategic situation in the region as a
whole.

Given the traditional rivalry between Arabs and
Iranians, the second development could only irritate
the neighboring Arab states, all of whose governments
have close links with the United States. Although most
Iraqi Shiites are of Arab origin, Iraq's Arab
neighbors fear that the sectarian affiliation of these
Shiites could diminish Iraq's Arab identity by driving
it more and more toward Iran.

This fear has lately prompted Saudi Arabia's foreign
minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, to echo a common Arab
concern in sharply criticizing what he alleges to be
Iran's meddling in Iraqi affairs. Yet such criticism
also had the effect of presenting the current
government of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Ibrahim
al-Jaafari, as an Iranian puppet. Further, it could
make Iraq's Shiites turn even further away from the
Arab world. The tragic outcome for Iraq and the region
could be that both Arabs and Iranians might enhance
their assistance to their respective sectarian allies
in Iraq in what is shaping up as a fight by proxy.

These are the very developments that the Bush
administration and its allies had wanted to avoid. But
they are now confronted with them as a fait accompli.
The occupying forces can no longer really trust either
the Iraqi Sunni or Shiites. The only friends on whom
they can count are the Kurds. No wonder President
Jalal Talabani, the most prominent Kurd in the present
Iraqi leadership, is desperately trying to persuade
the United States and Britain against any early
withdrawal of their troops.

The situation has become so tenuous that Washington
and London feel that they need urgently to
counterbalance the growing Shiite and Iranian
influence in the region. Hence President George W.
Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's lambasting of
the Iranian regime for helping the resistance in Iraq
and for seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Unless Bush and Blair succeed in opening direct
negotiations with the Iraqi resistance and enlist the
support of Iraq's neighbors, especially Iran and
Syria, as well as the Arab League, the Iraq conflict
is set to grow into a bigger and longer-term regional
crisis.

(Amin Saikal, a professor of political science,
directs the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the
Australian National University.)

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Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com









Aggo Akyea
http://www.tribalpages.com/tribes/akyea

"Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets,
I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau – 1854

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