Soccer Dad

Unintended

(h/t Larwyn) (via memeorandum) In a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Edward Luttwak argues that (unintentionally) President has conquered by dividing in Two Alliances

Just as the Sunni threat to majority rule in Iraq is forcing Sciri to cooperate with the U.S., the prospect of a Shiite-dominated Iraq is forcing Sunni Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Jordan, to seek American help against the rising power of the Shiites. Some Sunnis viewed Iran with suspicion even when it was still under the conservative rule of the shah, in part because its very existence as the only Shiite state could inspire unrest among the oppressed Shiite populations of Arabia. More recently, the nearby Sunni Arab states have been increasingly worried by the military alliance between Iran, Syria and the Hezbollah of Lebanon. But now that a Shiite-ruled Iraq could add territorial contiguity to the alliance, forming a "Shiite crescent" extending all the way from Pakistan to the Mediterranean, it is not only the Sunnis of nearby Arabia that feel very seriously threatened. The entire order of Muslim orthodoxy is challenged by the expansion of heterodox Shiite rule.

Fellow Watcher's Council member American Future recalls that he observed last year that

It is true that we did not declare our objective to be the introversion of Middle Eastern Islam, nor did we discuss the utility of Operation Iraqi Freedom as being the key to unleashing the ancient tensions between the Sunni and Shia. I cannot even be sure it was discussed in the highest offices. They may not have known.

But it's true nonetheless. Now, it may be a case of God watching over children, drunks, and the United States of America, but by removing the impediment of Saddam Hussein, we released that centuries-old demon that haunts Islam to this day.

The tensions that play out in Iraq are but a microcosm of the tensions that play out in Islamdom as a whole. Sure, one might argue that by removing her enemy we allowed an ascendant Iran, just as by removing Saddam we allowed an ascendant Shia south. But an ascendant Iran leads to a paranoid Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, etc. And while they are worrying about each other, scheming against each other, attacking and killing each other—well, while they are doing that they won't be killing Americans. And that is what we're after.

At the end of the article Luttwak delivers a back handed compliment to the president:

The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally. But the result is exactly the same.

It's interesting to contrast this view with the view of Shi'ite scholar Fouad Ajami from the end of November.

We can't shy away from the very history we unleashed. We had demonstrated to the Arabs that the rulers are not deities; we had given birth to the principle of political accountability. In the same vein, we may not be comfortable with all the manifestations of an emancipated Arab Shiism--we recoil, as we should, from the Mahdi Army in Iraq and from Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut--but the Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world have been given a new claim on the Arab political order of primacy and power. In the annals of Arab history, this is nothing short of revolutionary. The Sunni Arab regimes have a dread of the emancipation of the Shiites. But American power is under no obligation to protect their phobias and privileges. History has served notice on their world and their biases. We can't fall for their legends, and we ought to remember that the road to all these perditions, and the terrors of 9/11, had led through Sunni movements that originated in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Terror and ruin can come in Sunni and Shiite drapings alike.

For Ajami, America acted deliberately not accidentally. Also, he sees the deposing of Saddam as a signal event in America (or at least President Bush) declaring that it would no longer consider the domination of Sunni tyrants an acceptable status quo.

For Ajami the American role in the Middle East has been to break the Sunni domination of the region and allow for a more reasonable regime to take hold.

Blogdigger tags: Iraq, Iran, Sunni, Shi'ite, Edward Luttwak, Fouad Ajami.