The Spreading Quagmire

The neoconservatives hoped that invading Iraq would shake up the entire Middle East. It's a classic case of being careful what you wish for. Sectarian feuds are already spilling over from the Iraq civil war into neighboring nations, threatening to set off new civil wars and sectarian crackdowns. The whole region is in imminent danger of becoming like Baghdad and there doesn't seem to be a lot America can do about it, having squandered any prestige or influence it might have had.

The Washington Post yesterday reported on warnings from analysts of what might happen as Iraq continues its slide into chaos.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

Although some, such as Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, are using such opinions to argue that the U.S. should stay in Iraq and resist calls to partition that nation until the civil war peters out, such a view neglects the reality that sectarian partition and ethnic cleansing are happening already - no matter what the U.S. now does, no matter what Iraqi politicians say and no matter what lines are drawn or not drawn on a map. Indeed, the only reason to keep U.S. troops in Iraq now is as a stand-in for a true Iraqi national military which can handle external threats as well as internal security duties - to prevent Iraq's neighbours from squabbling over its dismembered carcass. That there have been no plans to provide such an Iraqi military since the earliest days of the occupation is a failure of the occupiers, not the occupied. However, an American presence may not even prevent that.

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

...In Damascus, a Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warned that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full-scale civil war. "Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved, Saudi Arabia, Syria," said the analyst, who spoke on condition he not be identified further.

"Regional war is very much a possibility," said Hiltermann, the analyst for the International Crisis Group. Iraq's neighbors "are hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region," he said.

Just how hysterical is illustrated by today's AP report from Jordan on sectarian paranoia in that country.

Sunni Muslim clerics and Jordanian officials have expressed worry that support for Hezbollah - high since the Shiite group's war with Israel - could encourage Jordanians, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, to convert to the Shiite branch of Islam.

The officials worry that could boost support for Iran, whose influence is considered a threat to Sunni-dominated governments like Jordan's throughout the Middle East. Such fears have existed in Jordan ever since the war in neighboring Iraq took a sectarian slant, with Sunnis and Shiites engaged in reprisal killings that some say veer toward outright civil war.

In 2004, Jordan's King Abdullah II warned that Iran was seeking to establish ``a Shiite crescent'' including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Since the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon, he has noted that many in the Arab world now consider the guerrillas as heroes.

The fears have become more widespread - and sharper - in recent months, with the influx of some 800,000 Iraqi refugees since the war began, even though they include a large proportion of Sunnis.

Last month, the government deported some Iraqi Shiites, apparently for practicing self-flagellation rituals at a Shiite shrine outside Amman. Jordan permits Shiites to worship but not to whip themselves and shed blood, as occurs in some ceremonies.

Jordanian authorities have also rejected requests from Iraqi residents to establish a Shiite mosque, according to two security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivities. The officials said Jordanian security suspected the mosque would become a center for spreading Shiite theology.

Various Jordanian Sunni clerics have signed on to the paranoia, saying, in effect, that that Iran has a secret plan to use Shiite conversions to infiltrate Arab societies and cause trouble. None of them have any proof for this, it is a matter of "faith" and fear.

Yet a look at Jordans demographics shows just how hysterical the fear actually is. A full 90% of Jordanians are Sunni and most of the rest ar Christian. Less than 1% are Shiite. Hardly a takeover. The AP quotes one old Jordanian as saying "Shiism is only in the imagination of some people who want to portray it as an Iranian influence."

From paranoia and hysterics, though, can be fashioned an excuse for a sectarian crackdown by the government, using fearmongering to accomplish political aims. That crackdown, which is very much in the wind, will itself provide the fuel for sectarian greivances which will further inflame the situation. It's a story familiar to all Iraqis by now and over the next few years we are going to see it become a familiar story to every other inhabitant of the region too. The neocons got their shake-up and it will take the form of a regional clash between Sunnis and Shiites. I can't imagine the "Clash of Civilizations" uber-right will be unhappy about that, but the rest of us should be.