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The English-language daily Tehran Times, quoting political scientist Hassan Nurani, said the influence of the late Imam Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution on the Palestinian cause is very obvious.The ideas of Imam Khomeini reinforced the Palestinians' determination to liberate their homeland and led to the formation of the Islamic Jihad movement of Palestine, he underlined. – from this Islamic Republic News Agency story
The wrong lesson to draw from this is that there is nothing important dividing Sunni and Shi'a. There is, and there has been for 1350 years, and because of Sunni persecution and murder of Shi'a, Shi'a resentment has grown. Through assorted accidents, the Shi'a in Iran and Iraq, while hardly sharing the same views on everything, do share an interest on protecting themselves from being attacked by or subjugated within Sunni Arab states.
What the story above illustrates is what we already knew: that the Shi'a of Iran are not, pace Gerecht and other admirers of Sistani and "the Shi'a" at My Weekly Standard, less fervent than Sunnis in their opposition to the sliver of a state controlled by Infidels -- Israel. And anti-Infidel fervor, the Islamic Republic of Iran feels, can be used to win the allegiance not of the Sunni Arab rulers, who are suspicious of their attentions, but of the Sunni Arab ruled.
And not only that. Like Muslims generally among non-Muslims in Europe, the Shi'a have been outbreeding the Sunni Arabs in both Iraq (where they were a few decades ago less than half the population, but now constitute 60-65%) and in Lebanon (where the Shi'a now constitute the largest of Lebanon's many groups, with 40% of the population). It is hardly unknown for Sunnis to convert to Shi'a Islam. And recently, apparently out of admiration for the determination and seeming effectiveness of the Islamic Republic of Iran both in its nuclear project and in its championing of the "Palestinian" cause (the Lesser Jihad against Israel), there have been cases of such conversion. This must worry the Ruler of Bahrain; it must worry the Sunnis in Lebanon; it must worry the Saudi government and especially those in charge of the Province of Al-Hasa.
But of course even if the Shi'a of Iran are supporting the largely Sunni "Palestinians," that does not mean that they have made up with the Sunnis, or ever could. Sunni theology is different, and Sunni history is full of anti-Shi'a wars and persecutions.
When it is a matter directly involving Infidels, then Sunni-Shi'a differences do not matter. But when the Infidels can choose to remove themselves, as they could in Iraq, the split between Sunni and Shi'a could be allowed to flourish. Now Israel cannot "remove" itself and should not be forced to, but rather, supported to the hilt in the moral, intellectual, and civilizational interests of the Western world. This support should be seen by every member of the Western world (and by every Christian in the non-Western world) as arising from the West’s very sense of itself and of its own coherence. But in Iraq those Infidel soldiers can and should remove themselves, not out of any desire to placate or appease, or to "cut and run" as the teasing first-graders like to say, but in order to allow the natural divisions within Islam to become still stronger, and to create a permanent fault line between Shi'a and Sunni that will cause tensions, hostilities, and expenditures of men, money, materiel by both the Islamic Republic of Iran and such malevolent Sunni states as Saudi Arabia. It will also require constant attention from both.
There is at least one event that demonstrates clearly that Muslims, being Muslims, will always assume that in the end it is better to trust fellow Muslims than any kind of Infidel. That event took place during the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Americans bombing his airforce. What did he do? The leader of a country that had attacked, unprovoked, a neighboring Muslim country, Iran, and who had conducted an eight-year war against that same country, Iran, that had just ended three years before, nonetheless chose to move as many of his planes as he safely could to Iran. He chose, that is, to trust the Iranians, even after that eight-year-war, with 80 or more of his planes. He calculated that the Islamic Republic of Iran, much as it might hate him and Iraq, would see the need to help out fellow Muslims.
It turned out he was wrong to have such faith. The Iranians never returned the planes. In this act of touching and misplaced faith, Saddam Hussein showed how deep, even for someone as suspicious as he was, is pan-Muslim loyalty or the sense that in a pinch, a fellow Muslim state not temporarily co-opted by the Infidels will help out another Muslim state. (Saudi Arabia, with its rented lackeys Egypt, and Jordan all supported the American effort against Iraq in 1990-91 because they feared that if Saddam successfully digested Kuwait, he might then move on Saudi Arabia. This "alliance" was misinterpreted in Washington as one of "staunch Arab allies standing with America in fighting aggression against brave little Kuwait").
And Saddam Hussein's trust in fellow-Muslim Iran was akin to the trust shown by his great model, the man he admired most, Joseph Stalin, when Stalin had Molotov sign the pact with Ribbentropp. And though a master of malevolent deceit himself, Stalin was genuinely surprised, genuinely chagrinned, when Hitler, ignoring the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, invaded Russia in June 1941. Why, he had counted on a fellow mass-murderer and totalitarian dictator to have some loyalties to at least another mass-murder and totalitarian dictator. Something of the same seemed to have passed through Saddam Hussein's perfervid and agitated brain before and during the Gulf War.
And in both cases, the dictators in question were wrong.
Posted by Hugh at October 19, 2006 11:43 PM
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When the chips are down you can ALWAYS count on those Islamaniacs to unite against the infidels no matter how much they don't get along. That's why favoring one over the other is pointless-they all believe the same basic nonsense the Koran spews forth like the diarrehea that it is.
If they do wipe us all out (due to our own stupidity) some will look back nostalgically about how much better it was killing the infidels as they saw off the heads of their opposing co-cultists. What a buch of lunatics-kill and kill some more is the common mentality of all of Islamania.
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at October 19, 2006 11:59 PM
Hugh
Until now, I've agreed with this analysis, but now, a question comes up. Iran is busy preparing its nuke, and would like to be where Kim Jong Ill is today. Why is it assumed that they won't be too busy to interfare in Iraq, and let it fall completely to pro-Sunni forced? Is it essential for them to have a proxy control on Najaf, Karbala and Basra while they are busy showing the Sunni street their Islamic credentials?
Point being - an US withdrawal could result in Iraq becoming a stable Sunni ruled country, like Bahrein. Is that in our interests? If our dog in this fight - the fight itself - doesn't materialize, isn't it leaving another regime ripe for Islamization?
I am beginning to have doubts about whether we should withdraw. I am afraid of Iraq becoming stable.
Posted by: Infidel Pride at October 20, 2006 2:56 AM
Tend to agree Infidel.
Stability favors the islamic dogs.
Instability favors us.
On this side we all favor defanging.
The issue is how we achieve same.
Killing about 100 insurgents a day sounds like a good start.
Taking out the mullahs sounds even better.
Ibrahim, do you hear the sounds of footsteps coming for you ?
Posted by: dgene at October 20, 2006 9:42 AM
Only those who understood that the removal of Saddam Hussein would inevitably lead to an impossible-to-stop civil war can be credited with "winning the war." One cannot credit the Administration because its entire idiotic strategy has been based on exactly the opposite goal from the one that will be achieved, sooner or later, and that cannot, in a sense, be avoided, though Americans can delay their own victory, and make it far more costly to themselves, by not removing themselves from Iraq.
Why do I call this "civil war" inevitable? It is inevitable because, though the Sunnis are greatly outnumbered, they are better trained, more aggressive, secure in the aid that will come to them, in money and weaponry and volunteers, from powerful Sunni Arab states next door, and simply cannot abide the thought that the inferior Shi'a -- whom many Sunnis regard with contempt (see Mubarak's uncensored remarks of a few months ago), suspicion, and hatred as quasi-Infidels (for Zarqawi, they were even worse than regular, Western Infidels). It is preposterous to imagine the Sunnis ever acquiescing in their new and inferior status. They deserve to rule; they must rule. That is their deep belief, and nothing, no "hold, clear, and build" strategy, with all kinds of goodies supplied by the long-suffering American taxpayer, being forced by this Administration to pay tens of billions or even hundreds of billions which those taxpayers never agreed to pay, and would, if their voices were truly represented, would not pay -- would not for one minute pay to support the people or the govenment of Iraq (a state that possesses the second-largest, or perhaps even the largest, oil reserves in the world, and should be quite capable of borrowing against future oil revenues, rather than having the Americans shell out still more money for them).
And the Shi'a, now keenly aware that the the disguisted Sunni despotism called "Iraqi Ba'athism" is now over for good. Those Shi'a know that they have all the cards. They constitute 60-65% of the population. The oil that exists outside of the Kurdish areas is entirely in Shi'a-populated and Shia-controlled parts of Iraq. The Sunnis have some date palm plantations, and that is their wealth. Furthermore, under the American occupation the Shi'a have organized themselves (those militias), and some have received training from Iranians (some have even left exile in Iran to return to Iraq), others have taken full advantage of the training offered by the terminally innocent Americans. Does anyone think the Shi'a in Iraq will ever again let themselves be dominated by the Sunnis, or not try to treat the Sunnis as the Sunnis treated them for the entire history of modern Iraq, and elsewhere as well, herever Sunnis dominated and Shi'a were insufficiently subservient?
Why is this outcome inevitable? It is inevitable because the very nature of Islam encourages violence, aggression, and an inability to compromise. The Qur'an, the hadith, and the life of Muhammad are full of tales of warfare, of cruel punishments, of implacable refusal to show mercy to enemies, of the need of victors to treat those defeated as completely vanquished. Central to Islam is the division of the world between Believer and Infidel, and between the two there must be conflict, that will end only when the last Infidel redoubt yields to Islam's dominance, and everywhere Muslims rule. That is, only when Dar al-Islam covers the globe, and Dar al-Harb is subsumed within it, can the "peace" of Islam finally be attained.
The tenets of Islam speak of Believer and Infidel. But the attitudes of Islam, to which those tenets naturally give rise, also can be shown in the way in which, within the Camp of Islam, one group of Muslims may treat another group if it believes that other group is insufficiently Muslim, or somehow incorrect in its Islam. Look at the treatment, for example, of the Ahmadis, or of the Ismailis, both of which, for different reasons, are regarded as insufficient in their Islam, or dangerously heterodox in the eyes of mainstream Muslims.
The idea not of political rivals who do battle, and then compromise -- which is essential for the survival of the modern democratic state -- is not to be found in Islam. Instead, what one finds is the Victor and the Vanquished. In Iraq, both Sunnis and Shi'a believe that once the Americans leave they will be victorious over the other. Each is trying, for now, to obtain the maximum advantage from the American presence -- whether training, or weaponry, or forcing the Americans to fight their enemies (at this point the Americans are sometimes fighting the Sunnis in Ramadi and Fallujah and Baghdad, and fighting the Shii'a in Baghdad and the various Shi'a-held cities where the militias, especially that of Moqtada al-Sadr, have taken on the Americans).
It doesn't matter that both Sunnis and Shi'a think that they will emerge the winners. What matters is to remove the American presence, and to see that conflict as inevitable, as unavoidable, and as, for us, a good thing. And it will be a good thing, especially if outside help arrives for co-religionists within Iraq, from Hezbollah volunteers and Iran, for the Shi'a, and from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria (where the Alawites will be happy to see the real Muslim fighters go off to Iraq and will do nothing to prevent them) -- men, money, material, and attention.
And meanwhile, in the Lands of the Infidels, those who haven't yet figured out what Islam is all about and what Muslims tend to do when Infidels get out of the way, will watch the spectacle and draw their own conclusions.
And if, as this fight develops, the Americans at long last choose to bomb Iran's nuclear project, they will find -- if a war between Sunnis and Shi'a is raging -- that the Sunni Arab response will be strangely, or rather, not strangely at all (a pretty epanorthosis), muted.
Posted by: Hugh at October 20, 2006 4:52 PM
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