Iraq's Problem Is Power Politics, Not 'Ancient Hatreds'
By Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department, is director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.
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There is indeed plenty of bad blood between Sunnis and Shiites. But today's sectarian rifts in Iraq and the wider region are the result of calculated efforts over many years by modern states—above all, Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Both countries have long jostled for regional dominance, and despite their bitter harvest, neither seems particularly willing to change.
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The Sunni-Shiite split traces back to the founding days of Islam, when the newly founded Muslim community had to decide who would lead after the Prophet Muhammad's death... The centuries since that rupture have witnessed plenty of conflict, with the minority Shiites, who comprise about 10% of global Islam, usually bearing the brunt of exclusion and persecution. But Muslim history has seen epochs of relative comity too. The Fatimids, a Shiite dynasty that ruled over North Africa in the 10th-12th centuries, were highly tolerant of Sunnis. At the dawn of Iraqi nationalism in the early 20th century, Sunni and Shiite fought side by side. And for decades, even Saudi Arabia, the global champion of Sunni Islam, and the Shiite Iran led by Shah Reza Pahlavi got along well enough.
So to find the spark that lighted the fires of 2014, don't look back to the seventh century. Look to 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers toppled the shah and installed a theocratic government unprecedented in the history of Shiism. Iran sought to expand its influence by creating terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and stirring Shiite ambitions in Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province.
The Saudi monarchy saw its religious leadership of the Muslim world challenged. The kingdom poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building mosques and schools, established huge organizations that propagated its puritanical brand of Sunni Islam and flooded the Muslim world with textbooks depicting Shiites as heretics and Christians and Jews as subhuman. The same poisonous springs that nourished the kingdom's sectarian counterrevolution would later help bring forth al Qaeda and its offshoots.
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Since about 1990, sectarian tensions have risen and fallen. After Ayatollah Khomeini's death, Iran's militancy cooled, while Saudi Arabia held an unprecedented national dialogue with the kingdom's restive Shiites in 2003. That same year, though, the engines of hatred again slipped into high gear. The trigger was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which destroyed the region's fragile equilibrium and, in retrospect, upended regional politics as much as the Iranian Revolution. Most Sunnis detested Saddam Hussein, but they also hated the results of his overthrow: the empowerment of Iraq's Shiite majority and the rise of a government in Baghdad closely tied to Iran.
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What finally doomed Iraq was the Arab Spring. After the 2011 revolutions began toppling Arab autocrats, the anxious Gulf monarchies fell back on old tricks to shore up their rule, treating democratic aspirations as sectarian treason. The Saudis, for example, backed Bahrain's minority Sunni ruling family with an armored column as it put down demonstrators from the tiny country's Shiite majority.
The most important new battlefield was Syria, long run by a dictatorship dominated by the Alawites, a small sect descended from Shiite Islam. For the Saudis and many other Sunnis, the chance to rob Iran of its key Arab ally and get payback for losing Iraq to the Shiites was irresistible. That produced a brawl in which everyone is all in. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is propped up by his Shiite allies, Hezbollah and Iran; the Gulf Sunnis, with Qatar at the forefront, are pouring cash and weapons to his Sunni foes. ISIS, the lineal descendant of the Iraqi branch of al Qaeda born after the U.S. invasion, grew fearsome in Syria, then stormed back to its homeland.
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What can the U.S. do? In the near term, very little. The demons of sectarianism shouldn't be seen as chthonic beings returned to wreak havoc—but in the decades since the Iranian Revolution, they have gripped much of the region, from Beirut to Islamabad. At key points, the U.S. has even unintentionally abetted them, turning a blind eye to Saudi machinations in the name of containing Iran and foolishly inflaming sectarian antipathies with the invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq.
America cannot abandon the Middle East because of our energy and security needs, and the U.S. and its allies are going to have to deal with the vast terrorist safe haven where much of Syria and Iraq used to be. President Barack Obama is right to push for a more inclusive government that could hold the Iraqi state together. And if he can reach a deal on Iran's nuclear ambitions and preserve our valuable tactical cooperation with Saudi Arabia on counterterrorism, we might talk seriously to both countries about dialing back their murderous rivalry.
But don't get your hopes up.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/iraqs-problem-is-power-politics-not-ancient-hatreds-1403888860
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