”The policy in the past used to be, ‘Let’s just accept tyranny, for the sake of... cheap oil, or whatever it may be, and just hope everything would be okay.’ Well, that changed on September the 11th for our nation. Everything wasn’t okay. Beneath what appeared to be a placid surface lurked an ideology based upon hatred.”
AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL & JEWISH AFFAIRS COUNCIL (AIJAC): The attacks of 9/11 generated a tide of commentary on the origins and aims of anti-Western jihadism. Lately, however, events have shifted attention to another, more long-standing feature of the Muslim world, raising the question of whether Islamic militancy against the West is now of lesser geopolitical significance than a stark, increasingly salient divide within Islam itself. This is the ancient divide between the numerically dominant Sunnis and a Shi’ite minority that is finally coming into its own.
In this, as in so much else, the prime exhibit is Iraq. Since the country changed hands from a Sunni dictatorship to a Shi’ite-controlled government, the conflict there, at first slowly but then with growing intensity, has at least in part taken on the appearance of a war between two sects. Every week brings gruesome suicide attacks on Shi’ites by Sunni terrorists, attacks answered in kind by Shi’ite militias or death squads. Iraqis have been dragged from their cars and killed merely for being Sunni or Shi’ite. Whole neighbourhoods of Baghdad have been emptied of one sect or the other. Mortar attacks have been launched from cemeteries and shrines, and the holiest of mosques have been bombed and torched by putative co-religionists.
American policymakers have seemed stymied by this outburst of Sunni-Shi’ite hatred, and especially by the assertiveness of the Shi’ites. Not only does it challenge a familiar conception of the order of things in the Middle East - an order ostensibly based on the leadership of longtime “moderate” Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan - but it coincides with the mounting aggressiveness of Shi’ite Iran, which aspires to regional hegemony. From Iraq to Lebanon, from Pakistan to the streets of Amman, the delicate fabric of a centuries-old pattern is being torn. The Great Divide (more) By Gal Luft and Anne Korin
Mark Alexander
