The Challenges of the Middle East.

AuthorSmith, Haviland

It is clear that there are powerful people both in the United States and in Iran who would like to force a real confrontation between our two countries. What is completely unclear is whether or not those hawks on both sides want a modified Cold War type confrontation, built perhaps on cyber warfare, or an all-out military confrontation. What this situation, with all its incredibly profound dangers and possible disastrous outcomes, has done is once again prompt the question, "what is the United States doing in the Middle East and what precisely are our goals there?"

Americans tend to ethnocentrism. If something is good for us, it has to be good for everyone else. The problem here is that the Middle East is perhaps the most politically, ethnically and religiously complicated geographic area on the face of the earth. It will not bend easily to amalgamation or regime change.

Let's start with the year 634 AD when the Muslim prophet Mohammad died. Most of his followers (those who evolved as the Sunnis) wanted the Muslim community to choose his successor while a minority (those who became the Shia) favored Ali, Mohammad's son in law, to be the new caliph. The Sunnis won and chose the first caliph, Abu Bakr. This simple disagreement became the single most divisive reality in the Middle East with fewer than 250 million Shiites (10-15% of all Muslims) pitted against the remaining 85-90% of Muslims, or 1.5 billion, who are Sunni.

Clearly, most of the Middle East is Sunni, while the Shia are concentrated in Iran and Iraq with significant minority populations in Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and India.

Iran is almost 100% Shia and is non-Arab at the same time. Their power in the Gulf is contested by the Saudis who are Arab and Sunni. During the Cold War and in the spirit of winning without hot war, both the USSR and the USA sought to develop and maintain international relationships that strengthened themselves and weakened their enemies. Both sides had acolytes--ours largely in Western Europe, the Soviets' in Eastern Europe. When either side seemed to be developing helpful acolytes around the world, the other side sought to disrupt the developing or ongoing relationships in question.

The same principle is in full force in the Middle East. Iran, definitely the minority player, sees it as critical to their survival, both as Shia and as non-Arab Indo-Europeans (Persians), to support and maintain all the Shia communities in the...

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