Monday, July 17, 2006
Sides line up
The Sunni Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, has cranked up its opposition to Hezbollah. From the front page of The New York Times:
With the battle between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah raging, key Arab governments have taken the rare step of blaming Hezbollah, underscoring in part their growing fear of influence by the group’s main sponsor, Iran.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, “These acts will pull the whole region back to years ago, and we cannot simply accept them.” Prince Faisal spoke at the closed-door meeting but his words were reported to journalists by other delegates.
This follows Saudi Arabia's quite public denunciation of Hezbollah on Friday. According to the Times, other leading Sunni Arab states, including Egypt and Jordan, have joined the chorus in opposition of Hezbollah, notwithstanding the extraordinary feelings about Israel's military campaign in the Arab "street."
It is nearly unheard of for Arab officials to chastise an Arab group engaged in conflict with Israel, especially as images of destruction by Israeli warplanes are beamed into Arab living rooms. Normally under such circumstances, Arabs are not blamed, and condemnations of Israel are routine.
But the willingness of those governments to defy public opinion in their own countries underscores a shift that is prompted by the growing influence of Iran and Shiite Muslims in Iraq and across the region.
Let's say it now so that there isn't any controversy about it in the future: it isn't only American "neocons" who think that Iran is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Indeed, the United States probably learned much of what it knows about Iran from Saudi intelligence, which is usually willing to fill us in on what's going on once it is comfortable that we won't embroil Saudi Arabia in any nasty local wars.
Sides are also lining up elsewhere in the region. On the same front page, the Times reports that the Sunni leaders of Iraq now want the United States to stick around to protect them from the murderous Shiite militias that have taken to slaughtering Sunni civilians since al Qaeda destroyed the Golden Mosque in February.
As sectarian violence soars, many Sunni Arab political and religious leaders once staunchly opposed to the American presence here are now saying they need American troops to protect them from the rampages of Shiite militias and Shiite-run government forces.
The pleas from the Sunni Arab leaders have been growing in intensity since an eruption of sectarian bloodletting in February, but they have reached a new pitch in recent days as Shiite militiamen have brazenly shot dead groups of Sunni civilians in broad daylight in Baghdad and other mixed areas of central Iraq.
The Sunnis also view the Americans as a “bulwark against Iranian actions here,” a senior American diplomat said. Sunni politicians have made their viewpoints known to the Americans through informal discussions in recent weeks.
As the article makes clear, the Sunnis ask for American help with great reluctance; they have "no newfound love for the Americans," as if that were even slightly relevant.
Commentary and speculation
The thread that unites these stories is the rising Sunni Arab resistance to Iranian expansionist terrorism. Whether or not this division is the intended consequence of American policy, it may yet work to the West's advantage.
The West and the non-violent strains of Islam have had to contend with two insurgencies in the Muslim world since 1979, the Iranian-Hezbollah-Shia dream of recovered empire, and the Sunni Islamist jihadi network, for which al Qaeda is the ideological base and most important node. While these two terrorist networks have divergent ideologies, they are similar enough in their choice of enemies that the West and the moderate Muslim world have had to worry about an alliance between them. Indeed, there is more than a little evidence that Iran and al Qaeda have in fact supported each other and acted in concert, much as Maoist China and Stalin's Soviet Union did in the early years of the Cold War. An alliance between a nuclear-armed Iran and the Sunni jihad is the West's nightmare scenario.
American intervention in the region has increasingly polarized Iran and the Sunni Arab world. Paradoxically, this was the result of our invasion of Iraq, which elevated the Shiite Iraqis to local power, both electorally and militarily. The armed Sunnis of the region -- whether governmental or tribal -- are so nervous that they are at least tacitly supporting Israel and the United States in their respective wars.
The question is whether the rising concern over Iran and the Shia will make it more difficult for the Sunni jihadis to treat with the mullahs of Tehran without jeopardizing their sources of funding, weapons and personnel. If so, the recent polarization of the region could well work to the West's advantage, just as the Sino-Soviet split weakened the Soviet Union at a crucial juncture.
1 Comments:
By 
allen, at
Mon Jul 17, 10:27:00 AM:
Who knows how much credence to give it, but it is being reported that Iran is making overtures for a ceasefire. Iran may realize the mortal peril it faces with the loss of Hezbollah and/or Syria. This would comport with your assessment.
http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/mideast_conflict
Israel hammers at Lebanese infrastructure
