As Mideast realigns, US leans Sunni
The White House is reembracing Sunni authoritarian regimes to counter the rise of Shiite Iran.
from the October 9, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"It's more Arab-Persian than it is Sunni-Shia," says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, highlighting the effort to contain Persian Iran that underpins interests. "It's not sectarian," he adds, "it's realpolitik."
Others agree that the US adjustment has more to do with a retreat from grand goals in the face of Iran's rise, than with changing sides in a sectarian divide.
"We have Condoleezza Rice backing off from supporting democratic reform in the region, and the more messianic goals of the first Bush administration have been abandoned, but that's because they don't work," says Michael Hudson, a specialist in international relations at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.
"When you talk to diplomats from places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, it's not Shiites, it's Iran and the power vacuum it's filling that worries them, and that's what the US is tapping into," he says.
That said, Arab leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah, have raised concerns about the rise of a "Shiite arc" in the region as a Shiite-dominated government friendly to Iran took the reins in Baghdad. And Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah warned Vice President Dick Cheney during a visit last year that his country could enter the Iraqi conflict on the side of Iraqi Sunnis if the US left Iraq and abandoned them.
It is in that context that some experts like Brookings's Indyk see at least part of the US motivation for arming some of the same Sunni tribesmen, in places like Anbar, whose doors US troops were kicking down not so long ago.
"We find ourselves regionally in a situation which is somewhat similar to what we are doing in Anbar Province," he says. "We are lining up the Sunnis to better take on the Iranians."
But another explanation for that support has more to do with turning Iraq's Sunnis against Al Qaeda-associated forces in Iraq – which are also Sunni, others note.
"I would call what we are doing in Anbar more of a tactic than a strategy, and it is not something we are doing because they are Sunnis, but because they are tribesmen – and tribesmen who are against other Sunnis who are called Al Qaeda," says Mr. Hudson.
CSIS's Mr. Alterman says Saudi Arabia is "using sectarian proxies to fight a national war in Iraq," but he says it does not follow that the US is working with Anbar's Sunnis out of sectarian motivations.
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