The new great regional game: Saudi Arabia and Iran

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/07/great-regional-arabia.html

The new great regional game: Saudi Arabia and Iran
By contributors | Jul. 8, 2014
By Gabrielle Rifkind and Gianni Picco

Decades of corrupt and authoritarian governments in the region which brutally suppressed both secular opposition and moderate Islamists have created the breeding ground for a more nihilist ideology.

Alarm has spread as the Islamist militant group Isis (Islamic State of Iraq & Syria) who now prefers to call itself the Islamic “state”, has crossed the border of Iraq and Syria, threatening the implementation of a caliphate and harsh Islamic law to any who do not practice its brand of violent ‘puritanism’. Sectarian hatred has begun to shape the regional DNA threatening to erode boundaries that have prevailed since the collapse of the Ottoman empire a century ago.

The regressive programme of ISIS has a merciless hardline vision and ultra-conservative agenda. It has already established a sharia court and the more recently published videos of its fighters burning their passports seem evidence of a hypermodern propaganda machine. This is a sophisticated organization with experienced leaders which has moved beyond al Qaeda and terror, to see itself as is a regional force for change.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the breakdown of Iraq’s political, economic and social infrastructure. This created a power vacuum for Al Qaeda and the likes of such groups as ISIS to fill. The evolution of ISIS can be traced to the extreme Salafist Islamism in Iraq, during the ‘first’ sectarian civil war of 2007-8. But such groups need to be put in a wider context: the ‘Great Game’ of the perverse spillover of the Saudi vision of the caliphate as expressed by the Taliban as they were and still are.