Soccer Dad

Sunni side up in arms

A few weeks ago Edward Luttwak wrote a fascinating essay "Two Alliances" in which he argued

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.

Two more items underline the underlying tension to which Luttwak refers.

The Gulf Cooperation Council issued a report claiming that members would not oppose an American strike at Iranian nuclear sites

"Teheran has to finally realize that if push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab Gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.," the report, authored by international studies director Christian Koch, said.

(via IMRA)

And Barry Rubin writes that the power struggle between Fatah and Hamas is revealing another fissure.

The real issue for the Palestinian political scene is not unity, but who is leading. Fatah is not willing to have unity at the expense of being the junior partner of Hamas. This is not just the normal desire to be in power. Fatah leaders are psychologically incapable of accepting the fact that they are only number two. That is still another reason why unity is impossible.
Within seconds of his call for unity, the crowd is shouting, "Hamas is Shiite!" Not only do the Fatah people hate Hamas, which after all is killing their cadre and taking the loot away from them, but they are now thinking in the framework of the new Middle East sectarian war. Hamas sides with Shia Iran, which is heresy for Arab nationalists, and with Hizballah, which is very uncomfortable for Sunni Muslims (Hizballah has very bad relations with most Lebanese Sunnis right now). So while Abbas said, "We are all sons of one people," the crowd continued to chant against the Shiites.

It might be that both Fatah and Hamas seek to destroy Israel as Rubin observes, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that of Hamas and Fatah each considers its way the correct way and each is becoming increasingly less tolerant of the other.

With the early romanticism of Hezbollah's promised rebuilding effort now a thing of the past it's beginning to look as if Iran is overreaching and that the Sunnis fearing uppity Shi'ites are starting to take stock.

As Luttwak noted this can give the United States some leverage in the Middle East. Will the United States respond creatively?

Blogdigger tags: Sunni, Shiite, Edward Luttwak, Israel, Gulf Cooperation Council.