Pitting Sunni against Shia

The West is bent upon keeping Israel, with its alleged 200 nuclear weapons, as the only superpower in the oil-rich Middle East. Maintaining this status has become even more compelling given America's unabated predicament in Iraq.

At the G-8 Summit, President Bush said: "One of the interesting things about this recent flare-up is that it helps clarify a 'root cause' of instability in the Middle East -- and that's Hezbollah and Hezbollah's relationship with Syria, and Hezbollah's relationship to Iran, and Syria's relationship to Iran. Therefore, in order to solve this problem it's really important for the world to address the 'root cause.'" One wonders if Bush deliberately missed Israel and US rapport in the balancing equation of the "root cause."

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For years now, the World has used the term 'root cause' to underscore Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem as one of the primary root causes behind a destabilized Middle East. I asked myself why our president, for whom I voted in the last election, misconstrues evidence so palpably.

I may have found my answer in a July 16 article in The Los Angeles Times: "Does Bush lack what it takes?" in which Jonathan Chait asks whether George Bush is "too dumb to be president?" In a recent book, journalist Ron Suskind portrayed Bush as a "man who reads little, eschews details, and gets most of his information from briefings."

Washington may have grossly miscalculated Israel's war of demolition of Hezbollah as an opportunity to drum up Arab sentiment against growing Iranian influence in the Middle East. Even the perceived US ally, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq in his July 25 press conference with President Bush refused to castigate Hezbollah for its kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

It is highly unrealistic to expect that a democratically elected Arab government would chastise Hezbollah while Israel expands its onslaught on Lebanese Arabs. But Maliki's differences with Washington over Lebanon are beyond simply symbolic: Maliki heads a Shi'ite coalition government dominated by three radical groupings all of which have ties to Hezbollah and Iran.

The pro-Western Sunni states fearful of spreading of Hezbollah's influence and emergence of Iran's ascendancy in the region made some brusque statements only to recant later.

-- Saudi Arabia castigated Hezbollah for kidnapping the two Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, and rightly so, but then went on indirectly reprimanding Syria and Iran;

-- In December 2004, Jordan's autocrat King Abdullah nervously described the emerging alliance of Syria, and Iran as a "Shia crescent";

-- In an oblique reference to Iraq's Shi'ite majority government, Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak caused a huge uproar when he said: "Most of the Shi'ites are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in."

These Sunni Arab autocrats prefer to be humiliated by Israel time and again, remain loyal to their Western protectors for continued autocracy rather than democratizing their rule of governance. Professor Charles Harb, of Beirut's American University, puts it this way: "For the first time in recent history, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli, and US interests now converge in an implicit alliance to quell Hezbollah."

Patrick Buchanan argues: "Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had -- when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah, and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah -- Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah."

It seems the shocking collateral damage of Bush's resolute support of Israel's flattening of southern Lebanon is the irresistible sympathy generated for Hezbollah across the Shia-Sunni divide. On July 28, The New York Times reported that Saudi Arabia and Jordan which "were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah's main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington." It seems the US plans to realign Middle East politics along Shia and Sunni divide has become far-fetched.

The probing question is: does the available evidence support the notion that Iran wants to be the balancing power in the Middle East? If one looks analytically, the lining up of an axis of alliance, the so called emergence of a "Shia crescent" comprising of Iran (88% Shia and 10% Sunni), Syria (15% Shia and 74% Sunni), and Sunni Hamas, does not seem compelling.

Some observers were wondering if Washington was tacitly encouraging Israel to attack Syria? The July 30 issue of the Jerusalem Post indicated that officials of the Israel Defense Forces have been "receiving indications from the US that the US would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria." If it was indeed Israel's plan, this could explain Israel's overreaction to the kidnapping of its two soldiers on July 12. This could also explicate why the US resisted ceasefire in the face of almost global outcry against Israel's spree of wholesale killing of civilians in Lebanon.

In 1982, President Reagan, during his meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had described the then Israeli devastation of Lebanon as a Holocaust, but a quarter of a century later, Bush and Blair looked on at the replay of Israeli brutalization of the same country.

Editor of the Weekly Standard, and the neo-conservative creed, Bill Kristol argues: "Hezbollah and Hamas aren't the real enemies: it's Syria and especially Iran that have to be dealt with, and not by the Israelis but by the Americans." Why so, because both countries are "enemies of the United States." They can be dealt with two ways: promoting "regime change" and maybe even dropping bombs on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons facilities. After all, opines Kristol: "Why wait? It's never too soon to start the bombing."

The neo-cons duped Bush with the wistfulness that Iraq was only months away from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, that the invading US troops would be hailed with candy and flowers, that democracy would glow across the Middle East, that Israelis and Palestinians would live peacefully thereafter. In reality, Bush's "axis of evil" is now emerging as "axis of regional powers" -- the most undesirable outcome to deal with.

A war between Israel and Syria is highly unlikely (and must not be) because a Jewish life is worth many times more to Israel and the American administration than an innocent Arab life. One of the root causes of violence in the Middle East is that the Palestinians in the occupied territories are treated the way the Romans treated the early Jews, the white South African treated the native blacks during apartheid. Make no mistake, I am as much anti-Zionism as I am anti-terrorism, anti-racism, anti-Islamist, anti-ethnic cleansing, and anti-Sunni/Shia schism.

Uri Avnery and Gush Shalom from Jerusalem wrote that the autocracies of the Middle East "owing to their unrepresentative nature and surrogacy to external interests, certainly fear combustive forces gearing up from within, which if combined with regional chaos can only hasten the dissolution of a US-led power elite. The US policy featuring a disproportionate and exclusive preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program is not only alarmist it is equally premised upon pitting Muslims against fellow Muslims by playing on the vulnerabilities of autocratic Arab regimes."

Dr. Abdullah A. Dewan is Professor of Economics at Eastern Michigan University.