Sunnis Worry About Shiite Power - Road to the Middle Class

BACK IN THE first Bush Administration I remember a Bush administration official explaining the Iraq strategy, and I paraphrase. With the current set up we are screwed, he said, so we are going to toss everything in the air and hope that the result turns out better.

Well, at least we don’t have Saddam to worry about any more. But we do have a lot of worried Sunnis, as Terence P. Jeffrey makes clear in a report of Secretary of State Rice’s recent visit to the Middle East.

Now, it is an ironic fact that among those who ought to be praying most fervently for the success of the teetering U.S. experiment in democracy in Iraq are the non-democratic leaders of nearby Sunni Arab regimes.
...
Her agenda included the efforts to restore stability in Iraq and to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Sunni Arab leaders now see these causes as intimately linked -- because they see themselves sinking into a Cold War, or worse, with a Shi'ite Iran that is exploiting the unrest in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.

So the net effect of the U.S. adventure in Iraq has been to change the worry from Saddam’s aggression to Iran’s aggression.

But the Sunnis are not helpless. They could help stabilize Iraq.

If the Sunni Arab regimes want to avert the catastrophe they envision, they should use every means possible to pressure their Sunni co-religionists in Iraq to shut down their insurgency -- before it's too late -- and cut a deal with the coalition government.

Do you think it is doable?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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Never Trust Experts

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