Nuclear Iran: Apprehending Shia-Sunni tension in ME

Iran says it wants to develop nuclear power for peaceful purpose. Yet, in the same breath, Iranian President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe out Israel from the face of earth. This doesn't sound much peaceful. Israel has had nuclear weapons for decades, but it never threatened to wipe out Iran. Iranian President Ahmadinejad also utters dire threats against the United States.

Why is Iran threatening the United States and Israel if it wants to develop peaceful nuclear power? Mark Bowden, author of "Guests of the Ayatollah," thinks that Iranian Mullahs are using the present confrontation with America to rally support of the masses in the same way earlier Shiite revolutionaries like Ahmadinejad used seizing the American Embassy in 1979 to rally support for the Shiite revolution. At that time, the Mullahs faced intense competition from secular parties and holding of 52 Americans as hostage, triggering a confrontation with the United States, helped them to consolidate their position, marginalising other political groups. As Mark Bowden writes: "Today, as the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameniei, presides over an increasingly restive, unhappy population ... President Ahmadinejad, has picked a new fight with the United States of America. ... In openly pursuing nuclear power and defying the world opinion, the old revolutionaries are shoring up their stature at home by appealing to nationalism and foreign attack. And why shouldn't they? It worked before."

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The Iranian people may become the ultimate victims of the Iranian regime's nuclear ambition. A look at Iranian author Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran," will make the point clear. Ms. Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and now teaches literature at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Her story of Iran is a struggle for survival in a country where radical Shiite leaders regularly "hang people in the streets;" it is a country where boys as young as 15 year-old were sent to battle during Iran-Iraq war to walk straight into enemy fire and clean mines by blowing up themselves, it is a country where independent-minded women are viewed as enemies of the state. Reading Nafisi will make most readers realise that Iran's Shiite Mullahs desire nuclear weapons to provide them with additional power to intimidate their own critics at home.

Or as Prof. Salim Mansur, professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and an expert on the Middle East, recently wrote in The Toronto Sun: "A majority of Iranians will despair for their own future, and that of their children and grandchildren, knowing too well that nuclear weapons will make their leaders feel invincible and extinguish any hope of regime change in Iran."

Moreover, it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Sunni Arab countries will sit passively while Shia Iran acquire the bomb. They will likely follow suit, and develop their own nuclear capabilities. As John Chipman, director of London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed out in the Financial Post: "The small Gulf Arab states would seek nuclear guarantees from the West, perhaps even closer affiliation to Nato. Saudi Arabia might reconsider its position and seek some kind of nuclear accord with Pakistan. Further afield, Egypt and Turkey might even think of going nuclear. ... A nuclear-armed Iran would cause a strategic earthquake leading to all sorts of diplomatic and security realignments."

This looming confrontation between a nuclear-armed Shiite Iran and non-nuclear Sunni Arab countries may be the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. Although the Shiites make about 15 per cent of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, they are a majority in Iraq and more than 90 per cent of Iranians are Shiites. This also includes Bahrain, where Shias are a majority ruled by a Sunni minority. Saudi Arabia has also a large Shiite minority and its dominant Wahabi Islam has long considered the Shias to be heretics and there is a long history of conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites. As Lebanon's leading Shia religious leader Sayyad Mohammed Hussain Fadlallah recently remarked: "There is a Sunni world in the Arab world and there is a history, bloody and complicated toawrds the Shia."

Most of Sunni countries connect their Shiite population to Iran and the Sunni Arabs are naturally afraid that a nuclear-armed Shia Iran would pave the way for the Iranian domination of the Arab world. Two years ago, King Abdullah of Jordan, an overwhelmingly Sunni country, caused an uproar by warning against any linkup between Shiite Iran and largely Shiite Iraq as an "emerging Shia crescent," threatening the Sunnis. The Sunni fears have been compounded by the muscle-flexing of Shiite Mullahs of Iran, now determined to pursue a nuclear programme and consolidate their influence in the Shiite-dominated Iraq. The implication of a nuclear-armed Iran is clear: Most Sunni countries will try to counter Iranian nuclear threat by developing their own nuclear capabilities.

Tensions between nuclear-armed Iran and non-nuclear Sunni Arab countries may be next stage of conflict in the Middle East.