A few timely Sunni/Shia factoids - which I find scary

[jannyk]

So, we all agree Iraq is a lost cause and has broken into Sunni/Shia civil war. Developments over the past few days have really worried me - Cheney in SA, the Iraq/Iran agreement, the rescheduling of the Maliki/Bush talks, Al Sadyr and his posturing etc., etc..

So I did a bit more research on Sunni/Shia geographic breakdown and here's what I got - I think I'm more worried now.

All figures are approximate:

85% of the world's Muslims are Sunni

Osama Bin Laden is a Sunni

Iraq, Iran, Bahrain, Azerbaijan are predominately Shi'ite (65-90%) Lebanon is 50% Shi'ite

Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and nearly all other Muslim nations (apart from Oman which is 'special')are overwhelmingly Sunni.

Al Sadr is a Shi'ia and now there is talk of him linking up with Hezbollah in Lebanon (Shi'ia)

US keeps telling Iran to 'butt out' but Iraq and Iran have announced a 'security agreement' hours before the GW/Maliki meeting

The prince of darkness made an emergency visit to Saudi Arabia (Sunni)

The GW/Maliki meeting gets postponed.

Are we in as deep doo doo as I suspect we are?

Can we discuss this - please?

[Kelly Rupert]

1. So what's your point?

That Iran is going to sponsor al-Sadr's Mahdi army and the Badr Brigade in an attempt to take over Iraq wholesale, which will then form a Shi'a crescent including Lebanon and Syria, which will present a massive security threat to the rest of the Muslim world, which may lead to region-wide warfare, possibly having a cataclysmic effect on world stability and economy? And especially considering the potentiality of either alliance or tension between Pakistan and Iran, which would have enormous implications on the Pakistan/India and India/China balances? And are you implying that such a conflict would put Russia and China (which is signing exclusive contracts with central-asian suppliers) at a strategic energy advantage over the West, leading to greater Chinese influence in East Asia and greater Russian influence in East Europe?

I mean, so what? Not like it's a big deal.

[moondust]

12. Something like that.

Where do Iran's ambitions stop? I'd guess that there is mounting concern in SA.

[ddbaj]

2. Yes, it's quite a complex and fucked up situation.

The Sunni leaders in the Middle East do NOT want Iraq in Iran's sphere of influence or even worse, under their de-facto control. Normally, it would be a no brainer for the US to back the Sunnis in Iraq... but guess what, we went in to topple a Sunni government! Also, we don't like Al-Qaeda... so no can do there.

So yeah, it's pretty messed up. Add in these two facts:

-A lot of the countries you list as Sunni have Shi'ite minorities big enough to cause a lot of trouble.

-If Hezbollah and the Shi'ia in general get involved in (another) fight with Israel, it's going to be hard for US-backed Sunni governments to take a stand against them without really pissing off their people.

Ah, the wonders of geopolitics.

[ClintonTyree]

8. And these are but a few........

of the factors Bush and his caravel of conservative cretins failed to think about before their rush to war.

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster help us all.

[Phredicles]

3. Sunnis aren't all the same,

Any more than, say, Protestants are all the same. Bin Laden and many of the Saudis, though, are Wahhabists - those are among the real vicious nutcases.

And I know that not all the Shiites in Iraq are "on the same side"; there are groups fighting among themselves. It can't be summed up in twenty-five words or less, although even that would be more research than our brilliant leaders bothered to carry our before committing us to this nightmare. :eyes: :grr:

[ddbaj]

4. That's very true.

However, there is a very real chance of a broad conflict between traditionally US-backed Sunni governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan) and the "enemy" Shi'ite government of Iran and governments under its sphere of influence.

It wouldn't be a uniform Shi'ite vs Sunni conflict, nothing is that black and white, but it could be a bigger version of what we see in Iraq right now, only with a lot more fire power. Israel and Al-Qaeda would both be wildcards.

[Nite Owl]

5. Regional war with

worldwide implicatons. And our troops are stuck in the middle of it all. We should have pulled them out months ago, their might have been a chance for them to work things out but now sides are being taken and it's much worse. I hear all that is going on there and all I can think is what has * done? The worst case scenario is unforlding before our very eyes and they won't even discuss the troops leaving. Maybe they are serious about all the Rapture nonsense cause they seem to be helping world wide desctruction along.

[MADem]

6. Those facts are nothing new. Shi'as are also POORER, and they reproduce more than Sunnis

...but they are still a minority of all Muslims, and the big dough in the Arab world belongs to SUNNIS.

IF the Iranian 'shi'a crescent' designs are prosecuted across the Arab world, watch for big Arab money to get plopped down to counter any move of that sort, and big Arab military sabre-rattling to take place. The Persian's first foray, that little escapade in Lebanon, didn't work too well for them, but they're just ballsy enough to try again closer to home, in the marshy shi'a south of Iraq. Make no mistake, the Iranians WANT to be players on the regional stage. They've got that same "Look at MEEEEE!!!! Follow MEEEEEEE!!!!!!!" attitude that Nassir was pulling in Egypt years back. We saw how well that shit worked over the long haul (NOT!), even with Russkie help...

I've been saying this for some time, Arabs fucking HATE Persians, because Persians think they're better than Arabs. They consider Arabs as ignorant sand monkeys with no culture. It's not true, but they aver that any creative or intellectual pursuits throughout history by ARABS actually occurred because those Arabs were schooled by Persians, or had Persian blood in them. They're very arrogant that way...

Watch the Turks get involved as well.

Watch Israel cooperate with Arabs to put the Persians in their place...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend....

None of this shit is new. What's happening right now in Jordan has more to do with the US leaving Iraq than anything else. On the one hand, the leak of that memo could be "embarrassing." On the other, it gives Monkey an excuse to abandon Maliki because Maliki is 'dissing' the Boy Prince.

We aren't in any deeper doo-doo now than we've been for some time. In a perverse way, Maliki's pouting and childish behavior (which he hopes will shore him up in the eyes of the anti-US factions) gives the Monkey an 'out' to leave and declare victory. "Well, they're a democracy, and they say they can handle it on their own...."

King Hussein's boy isn't nearly as sweet on the US as his daddy was. He's probably pissed as hell that he's gonna have to throw uniformed bodies into this mess, along with Egypt and others, in order to keep the damned Iranians in check and prevent them from moving into Iraq. If the Arabs unite, and they WILL against the Persians, albeit reluctantly, the Persians will be pushed back into their box.

The Iranians have to play it carefully, too. Memories of the Iran-Iraq War are still reasonably fresh. Every family lost several members in that long, miserable slog of attrition. And a shitload of Iraqi Arab-shias died in that conflict, so they might not take too kindly to anything that looks like a Persian occupation of their land, religious leadership and loyalties notwithstanding--the Persians would be better off funding and supporting a group of Iraqis that answer to Teheran, and that might not be all that easy to do.

The fuckers in the catbird seat right now are the Kurds. And they're not trusting anyone, but taking full advantage/cooperating here, and screwing over there, to get what they want. They're prosecuting their OWN agenda nowadays, and with everyone else pushing and pulling on all sides of them, they're likely gonna be successful. They've got more unity and focus than any other segment in the former nation of Iraq!

[jannyk]

10. I agree with much of what you say except

I disagree with the following points:

<<Watch Israel cooperate with Arabs to put the Persians in their place...The enemy of my enemy is my friend....>>

I think there would be an Arab/Persian alliance to destroy Israel first and then they'd fight amongst themselves. Based on the same 'enemy of my enemy premise'.

Also, your point about the poverty among Shi'ia just gives them a better reason to fight and less to lose. And


<<IF the Iranian 'shi'a crescent' designs are prosecuted across the Arab world, watch for big Arab money to get plopped down to counter any move of that sort, and big Arab military sabre-rattling to take place.>>


All the US billions and 'sabre rattling', despite 'shock and awe', aren't having much effect in just the 'local squabble' that is Iraq. So if the reigning 'superpower' can't subdue one 'local' Sunni/Shi'ia conflict, how can the Sunni Arab States?

[MADem]

11. We shall see. I've heard the invective from Arabs about Persians and vice versa.

It's some deep shit.

The concept of destroying Israel is absurd--that's the fifty first state. They wouldn't even try it. And Israel is a useful third party conduit in many ways, for all sorts of things....ask the Egyptians. And the Turks. And the Syrians. Even the Iraqis used to use them in the old days. You don't boast about it, but that stuff goes on all the time. Israel is a handy place in the Arab world. It's an object of hatred on the one hand, and a place to lay excuses for their own failures to get their shit together. And, it's a secret partner when plausible deniability is required.

I wouldn't necessarily count on the conflict being subdued by the Arabs, but I do see de facto partition as a possibility. The Kurds go their own way, and the Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Saudis all send in peacekeepers in specific regional areas contiguous to their own borders to keep them from going after each other. If the Iranians try to pull any shit, they get checked by that crowd.

We could have EASILY 'subdued one local sunni/shi'a conflict,' if we'd followed Rick Shinseki's guidelines with regard to troop levels before, during and after the invasion. But we didn't, and now, we're for all intents and purposes out of the mix. We have failed, and have no credibility in the theater anymore. It's up to the Arabs to pull it together, or let theIraqis fuck it up and blow it up themselves and come in ex-post-facto to pick up the pieces.

But I don't see anyone letting the Iranians take more than a small chunk of the joint, if any of it. Those Arabs won't permit it, and they won't cooperate with the Persians very deeply or for very long--there's the ARAB world, and then, there's those Indo-European PERSIANS who do not speak Arabic, do not accept the "proper" lineage of Muhammad, have halfassed, heretical ideas about his decendants, pray in the "wrong" fashion, and to make matters worse, do not understand the Bedouin tradition at all, and seem to ignore the fact that the Koran is written not in Farsi, but in Arabic. They are pushy and nervy bastards, from an Arab perspective. The icing on the cake is that the Persians are snotty towards them, and regard them as unwashed buffoons. They resent that shit deeply.

They aren't the same at all, they genuinely don't like each other....only Americans seem to think they are all happy families, that living in the same general region suffices. It doesn't. All you have to do is look back on the fairly recent and brutal Iran-Iraq war that dragged on for eight absurd years, and killed over a million, for absolutely NO good reason, to see how deep that hatred goes. It wouldn't take much to get that shit happening again, with new players on the battlefield.

It's just not in their history or their inclinations to connect at all. They've nothing in common. Hell, the Arabs at least have the same DNA as the Jews--they're all Semites!

YMMV but that's the way I see it.

[KharmaTrain]

7. Watch The Ted Koppel Special On Iran On Discovery...

It's the first real look inside Iran that I've seen and give a side of the story few in this country...including some of the most enlightened on DU have seen.

At the outset of this ugly invasion, many here predicted this would turn into a religious war and that by removing Saddam it would create a power vaccuum that Iran would quickly fill. Now boooosh is trying to save his ass and that of his Saudi friends and they may pay the price for going along for the ride in Junior's great misadventure and war for profit.

I posted earlier that I sense we're about to revisit Mogadishu '93...surrounded by militias with no friends or allies. The window for making an orderly withdrawl is rapidly closing...and I fear what may be ahead.

[jannyk]

9. I've seen the Koppel

Iran Special twice now and agree it is 'must see' tv for an unbiased look at Iran and it's people.

I was one who feared the whole middle east exploding even prior to the Bush invasion. In England, we studied ME History and that is why I cannot understand Blair's buying into this mess - maybe he skippped that class.

It's just that today's recent developments make me think it is much closer now than ever before. The US has no control over this situation anymore - it is out of our hands and has been for a while. Yet the Administration will never admit it and is taking us deeper into this quagmire - and I don't just mean the poor troops.