Iraq's sectarian fire
IN IRAQ, scattered attacks on Shi'ites by Sunni groups last week ought to illuminate for US policy makers the momentous changes they have wrought there, and throughout the Mideast. Those policy makers should realize that they have been tipping crucial power balances in the region, frightening longstanding clients and allies while enhancing the rival regime in Iran.
Those attacks are the bombings of Shi'ites commemorating Ashura, a 10-day period devoted to remembrance of the defeat in battle of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, whom Shi'ites revere as the rightful seventh-century heir to leadership of the faithful. Over the past two years, Sunni Arab extremists called Salafists have killed at least 230 Shi'ites observing Ashura. Over the past several months, Shi'ite militias operating on their own or as members of Iraqi government security services have retaliated by capturing, torturing, and sometimes killing Sunni Arabs suspected of belonging to the jihadist networks.
These symptoms of a sectarian vendetta are the most visible signs within Iraq of a regional power struggle between Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs that has been going on for a quarter century -- since the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution in predominantly Shi'ite Iran and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980. The US invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Saddam's Arab nationalist regime, and the ensuing ascent of the Shi'ite majority in Iraq cast light on the centrality of the Shi'ite-Sunni conflict for the larger Middle East and the dramatic ways in which the US intervention in Iraq has altered the power balance between those two sects of Islam.
The Sunni Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt have made it plain they see the consequences of regime change in Iraq as a strategic setback for their side. They see in Iraq's turbulence a catalyst for the destabilizing emergence of what King Abdullah of Jordan called a ''Shi'ite crescent" running from Iran through Iraq and extending to Lebanon. Saudi officials have warned that the Bush administration has, perhaps inadvertently, empowered Shi'ites in Iraq and in the surrounding region.
The exclusivist Wahhabi doctrines of the Saudi regime stigmatize Shi'ites as heretics. Shi'ites in Saudi Arabia -- who make up only about 10 percent of the population but are concentrated in the oil-rich eastern province -- have been treated as second-class citizens. Their public commemoration of Ashura in recent days has been taken as an audacious testing of the frontiers of their freedom to practice the rites of their branch of Islam.
The Bush administration has appeared to stumble into the middle of this regionwide power struggle like a sleep-walking giant, knocking over long-established structures and then awkwardly trying to set things right. The actions of the administration seem to produce unintended consequences over and over again.
American envoys helped establish a representative democracy and a constitution for Iraq that have empowered Shi'ite religious parties with affiliations to Tehran. The effect has not been to diminish the Iranian regime's animosity to America or Tehran's willingness to sponsor Shi'ite militias in Iraq and the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah.
And when US officials attempt to assuage Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian fears of a Shi'ite ascendancy in Iraq by trying to coax Iraq's Sunni Arabs into participation in the country's fledgling democracy, the American initiative arouses wariness and suspicion among Iraqi Shi'ites. They retain painful memories of the way the elder President Bush, heeding the counsel of Sunni Arab regimes, permitted Saddam to put down a popular uprising in the spring of 1991, slaughtering tens of thousands of Shi'ites.
Being fairly oblivious to this history, Americans do not seem to realize how deep Shi'ite distrust of US intentions runs. At the same time, President Bush's attachment to the reconciling powers of elections and democratic procedures makes it hard for administration policy makers to recognize how their actions in Iraq are seen by client regimes in Riyadh, Amman, and Cairo. They are perceived as the actions of a sorcerer's apprentice who has allowed all the pots to boil over, creating a mess that those Sunni Arab regimes will have to cope with.
Leaders of these regimes express their anxieties in public only rarely, but they have more to worry about from the rise of Shi'ites across the region and the prospect of Iranian influence than they do from Israel's military might.
Nonetheless, those same regimes bear part of the blame for the dangerous drift toward sectarian war in Iraq. They have been too slow to denounce and help defeat the Sunni Arab jihadists from their countries who have gone to Iraq to wage holy war under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist master who has overtly declared that his primary objective is to kill Shi'ite heretics and provoke a sectarian civil war in Iraq.
The number one objective of US policy for Iraq -- and for the larger Middle East -- must be to stamp out the flames of that sectarian war before they consume Iraq and spread outward across the Gulf, into central Asia, and toward the Mediterranean. Fortunately, the foremost Shi'ite clerical authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has counseled restraint. He has preached the wisdom of Shi'ites relying on the democratic principle of one person, one vote to acquire the political power that was long denied them.
All the other parties in Iraq and the surrounding region who are threatened by the specter of sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites need to develop a comparable wisdom. The conflagration that Zarqawi's jihadists have been stoking could otherwise set the entire region afire. 