Observers such as Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal are increasingly worried that the Iraq war could precipitate a new “Thirty Years War” within Islam between the Shia and the Sunnis. The insurgency in Iraq has degenerated into an internecine sectarian struggle. Sunni al-Qaida elements have targeted the Shia and Sunnis have come to see the Shia as collaborators with US imperialism. The Shia have used death squads and ethnic cleansing against Sunnis and are using their demographic majority to impose a de-construction of the Iraq state that would leave half of current and all of future oil reserves in the hands of Kurdish or Shia cantons, with little going to the central government, at the expense of the Sunnis. The resulting weak balkanised Iraq will have no will of its own or capacity to act in international affairs. It will become an object of struggle between the US, which will seek to maintain military bases and control over Iraqi oil and Iran, which will use its affinity to the Iraqi Shia to drag Iraq into its orbit and try to force the Americans out. The empowerment Iran has felt from its new influence in Iraq and its ability to make life difficult for the American occupiers has encouraged its new president to defy the West over Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi sectarian struggle may spill over into a region-wide conflict. The empowerment of Iraqi Shia could spread disaffection among Shia ruled by Sunnis elsewhere, particularly in the Gulf Arab states and Saudi Arabia. The images of inter-sectarian mayhem in Iraq and the trans-state al-Qaida network could stimulate a spillover of similar conflicts from Pakistan to Central Asia. Sunni Arab states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia are alarmed at the increasing influence Iran may achieve in a Shia-dominated Iraq.
It is a matter of some debate how far this was an unintented outcome of the US invasion of Iraq. The neo-cons made no secret of their desire to use the Shia (as well as the Kurds) to destabilize Iraq and the model of governance encouraged by the US occupation stimulated sectarian/ethnic politics. Civil war in Iraq makes the Shia government dependent on the presence of US forces while this presence stimulates Sunni insurgency; the degeneration of what might have been a national resistance to foreign occupation into sectarian civil war, alone allows the US to sustain its presence in the country.
Arab observers are struck by the similarity between this and Post-World War I Western imperialism’s exploitation of sectarian and ethnic divisions to divide and rule the Middle East. It may or may not be in the US national interest to encourage a further deepening of the fragmentation that has afflicted the Middle East since the arbitrary imposition of state boundaries by Britain and France after World War I. But Israeli strategists have never made any secret of their belief that exploitation of the many divisions within the Arab world would serve Israeli interests; the classic cases have been Israeli alliances with Lebanon’s Maronites and now with Iraqi Kurds against Muslim Arabs. The biggest winner of the Iraq war, destroying the potentially strongest Arab state, has not been the US, but Israel.
The US neo-cons, with their intimate connections to the Israeli Likud party, share the Israeli view of Arabs. They believe that “creative destruction” in the Middle East will serve US and Israeli interests and care little about the suffering it inflicts on the region’s people or even the costs to American soldiers and taxpayers. Rather than learning a lesson from Iraq, the neo-cons want to deconstruct the Syrian and Iranian regimes as well. Some have proposed encouraging separatism among the Shia situated in Saudi Arabia’s oil producing eastern coastal province. The neo-cons may represent a small extremist faction but they were able to successfully capture US foreign policy and launch a war on Iraq that few in the US establishment wanted. Today, a similar struggle is going on in Washington over policy toward Iran.
The neo-con policy could inflict unmanageable chaos on the Middle East. A divided Islam, of course, would end any prospect that the Islamic world could achieve some unity and autonomy of Western domination. But chaos is sure to be a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism that will not remain confined to the Middle East. It might also allow sabotage of regional oil pipelines and fields, leading to a 20% cut in world petroleum production and a global depression.
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