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The US Shouldn’t Take Sides in the Sunni-Shiite Struggle

The US Shouldn’t Take Sides in the Sunni-Shiite Struggle
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Over the past two decades, the United States approached the Middle East through its own conceptual frameworks: dictatorships vs. democracy, secularism vs. religion, order vs. chaos.

The US Shouldn’t Take Sides in the Sunni-Shiite Struggle

In his prescient book, "The Shia Revival," Vali Nasr argues that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the tipping point of the sectarian struggle. The United States saw itself as taking democracy to Iraq, but people in the region saw something different - the upending of the balance of power. Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of all Muslims, had long dominated the Arab world, even in Shiite-majority countries such as Iraq and Bahrain. But in one stroke, that changed.

Though there always was tension, Sunnis and Shiites have always been living in peace, for the most part, until recently. In the 1960s and '70s, the only Shiite power, Iran, was ruled by the shah, whose regime was neither religious nor sectarian.

The pivotal shift took place in 1979 when in Saudi Arabia, militant radicals took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, proclaiming opposition to the royal family and what they saw as its lax ways. The event scared the Saudis, pushing the regime substantially to the religious right. And Saudi Arabia's governing ideology of Wahhabi Islam was always anti-Shiite. Around the time of its founding, Saudi Arabia demolished Shiite mosques and shrines and spread its view that Shiites are heretics.

Saudi Arabia is facing a series of challenges, from "ISIS" to domestic extremists. The country's large and active social media are dominated by radicals. And as oil prices plunge, government revenue has collapsed, and the nation's generous subsidies to its people will be hard to sustain. The Saudi regime needs greater legitimacy.

Add up last weekend's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric, the break with Iran, the war on Yemen and Saudi policy toward Syria, and you see a more assertive, aggressive and sectarian foreign policy than Saudi Arabia has ever pursued.

However, the strategy is not without risks, external and internal. About 10 to 15 percent of Saudis are Shiites, and they live in the Eastern Province, atop the kingdom's oil fields. Neighboring Bahrain and Yemen are now filled with aggrieved Shiites, who see Saudi Arabia as repressing them. And Iran will surely react to Saudi actions over time.

In general, the United States should not take sides in the broader sectarian struggle. This is someone else's civil war. After all, the single greatest threat to the United States emanating from the Middle East remains radical extremists, many of whom have drawn inspiration, funding and doctrine from Saudi Arabia.

Source: The Washington Post, Edited by website team

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