Tag Archives: Sunni

Britain, History, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Society, United States

Middle East history. It needs to be understood.

MIDDLE EAST

Ancient indifferences are reshaping the Middle East and forging unlikely new alliances

GEOPOLITICAL statements come no more obscure than one given earlier this week by an Israeli news site.

A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family had reportedly told the broadcaster Kan that, in his view, Iran had started the Gaza war by instructing its proxy group Hamas to attack Israel on October 7.

Tehran’s attention, according to this nameless royal, was to thwart the imminent normalisation of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Saudis.

This is so important because it symbolises the extraordinary transformation under way in the politics of the Middle East. For a Saudi royal to express such a view – that a Muslim country instigated the conflict for the purpose of spreading discord – would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But that’s not the only way in which the winds of change are resettling alliances in this volatile region.

Five days ago, the ayatollahs of Iran inflicted their first direct attack on Israel since they came to power in 1979.

For some 45 years, the Islamic Republic has plotted the destruction of what its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “the evil Zionist regime”. But it has left the actual attacks to its proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

This fresh assault did almost no damage, thanks to the defensive coalition that shot down almost all of the weapons directed at Israel.

The US and UK played a role in this. But they were joined by two other countries for whom defending the Jewish state would have been fanciful until recently: Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

For most of the time Israel has existed, Saudi, as one of the leading Muslim nations and home to the holy city of Mecca, has been its implacable foe. But now it is on the verge not just of tolerating Israel but becoming an ally.

Similarly, back in 1967, Jordan actually invaded Israel – a disastrous move which lost it the territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Yet now Jordan, too, has stood alongside Israel to protect it from Iranian bombs. This newfound cooperative spirit continues apace: it has emerged that both the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates had passed helpful intelligence to America to use in Israel’s defence, with Jordan further agreeing to let the US and “other countries’ warplanes” use its airspace, as well as sending up its own jets. The rise of Iran – and its chilling proximity to a nuclear weapon – has driven old foes closer.

Iran now dominates a vast region from its borders with Iraq, through Syria and Lebanon, to the Mediterranean. Through its Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, and its own navy, it is causing chaos and major disruption in the key Red Sea trade route.

And it has turned the Palestinian cause into a strategic vehicle for its own ambitions through two other proxies, Hamas (Gaza) and Hezbollah (Lebanon). This chaotic and meddlesome statecraft has appalled other Muslim countries.

The story of the Middle East used to be “Israel versus everyone else”. However, that is no longer true. To understand how all this has come about, you need to go back to the very roots of Islam – and the schism within it. In 610AD, Mohammed unveiled a new faith. By the time he died in 632AD, he and Islam were all-powerful in Arabia, and within a century it had subjugated an empire stretching from Central Asia to Spain.

But as history teaches us, Islam was split over who should succeed the Prophet. One faction argued the leadership should be passed through his bloodline. They became known as Shias, from shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali”, who was Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law.

The others, the Sunnis (followers of the sunna, or “way” in Arabic) said leadership should be determined on merit.

Ali was elected as “caliph” (spiritual leader) in 656AD but within five years was assassinated, enshrining an enduring split.

Fast forward to 2024, and about 85 per cent of the world’s 1.6billion Muslims are Sunni, while 15 per cent are Shia.

Two countries now vie for the leadership of Islam, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Since the mullahs seized power in Tehran 45 years ago, the divisions and mutual hatreds have only grown.

As a minority within Islam, the Shiites have historically been treated as subordinate in Sunni-dominated countries. But there has been a significant growth of the Shiite population in Gulf nations. This has increased anxiety among Sunni rulers over the growing power of Shia Iran.

In Gulf states such as the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and especially Saudi Arabia, the Shia threat – in other words the threat from Iran – is seen as existential.

Egypt, too, which has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979, is also an arch enemy of the mullahs. In Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war with Hezbollah, Sunni countries were, behind the scenes, willing Israel to triumph, just as it is said now that Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia want Israel to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

The rapprochement of some Sunni countries was embodied in the 2020 Abraham Accords which normalised relations between the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel, and later Morocco and Sudan.

There is logic, then, to the deepening alliances between Sunni states and Israel. The Arab nations understand that while Israel has no ambitions to dominate its neighbours, Iran seeks to control all of the Middle East.

What’s indisputable is that if you don’t understand this split and history, you can’t understand the Middle East at all.

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Britain, Foreign Affairs, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Uncategorized, United States

The bloody shambles in Iraq…

IRAQ

Amid the despicable violence and rising tide of horror stories emanating from Iraq, there seems to be little constructive thought emerging from Western politicians on how to solve the political and humanitarian issues that are directly confronting the country.

Politicians have become like panic-stricken rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming motor vehicle. What is more, they do not appear to know which way to go.

The one thing that they do know is that something must be done in curbing the barbaric savagery and advances of the Islamic State (IS). Developing a viable and effective strategy, however, against the brutal campaign of the IS has, so far, clearly been beyond their competence.

Many military commentators and strategists will strongly believe that military intervention must be instigated only as a matter of last resort. Many of them did oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the cold-blooded murder of an American photojournalist, James Foley, this week, along with the Islamic State’s continued genocidal attempts to extinguish religious minorities, will have made many to believe that there is now a powerful and practical moral case for intervening against the insurgents of IS.

What the world is witnessing is the terrible and awful consequences of the so-called Arab Spring, so naively celebrated by almost all Western leaders just a few months ago.

Many people who have watched and read news reports from this embattled and disintegrating region will be aghast and mortified as events have unfolded. Intervention must now be given a high political priority to protect the lives of Iraqis and to restrain the rising and rapacious tide of the Islamic State.

Some western interventions in the past have proved highly successful and were no-doubt of an enormous benefit to civilians caught up in war torn countries. For any intervention to succeed there must be clear direction from the politicians. Sadly, though, this is distinctly lacking within Iraq as the West’s leaders seem to stumbling over themselves as they try to configure exactly what they want to achieve.

Given our recent involvement in two bloody and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we should have grave fears that western politicians do not have a clear idea of what form such military intervention should now take. For it is imperative that before we even consider sending so much as one British soldier back to Iraq, our government strategists must decide with absolute clarity and precision the objective of the mission.

They must commit sufficient resources to ensure the job is done with as little risk as is possible to the lives of those who are sent to a land that is fraught with danger. If our intervention is based on half-thought-through plans and weak intelligence, this risks not only further treasure being plundered in terms of financial resources and human lives expended but could embroil us in another almighty mess of a war.

Any ill-conceived plan would be both dangerous for our already depleted military and, in the longer term, precarious for Britain’s standing on the world stage.

Crucially, any cogent plan must involve our intelligence services providing the information on which highly-targeted and heavy air strikes can be launched. The success of these should mean that few boots will be required on the ground and that our involvement be over in a matter of months.

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As the situation deteriorates in Iraq, the country where the current unravelling of security across the Middle East started with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, we owe it to the Iraqis to halt the advance of extremists and then help to restore peace and order.

Furthermore, our credibility in the West depends on us doing something more than just launching pin-prick air strikes or dropping bags of rice to help the thousands of innocent people caught up in this appalling civil war.

We have faced similar problems before, most notably in Afghanistan in 2001 when the Americans, supported by the British, launched a highly successful campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that had ruled the country for five years.

At the time, the Taliban were as brutal and powerful as the Islamic State are today and they, too, wanted to drag the country back to 7th Century-style rule.

But, within just six weeks, the US-led invasion, which had the simple objective to eliminate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, had been successfully completed.

The strategic key to this successful campaign was that much of the fighting on the ground was not done by Western forces but by Afghans themselves.

The U.S. and UK restricted their military involvement to providing intelligence, air power and Special Forces on the ground, who worked alongside local people.

Unfortunately, military success in toppling the Taliban was not followed up by any coherent plan, and President George W. Bush transferred his attention, along with most military and economic resources, away from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein we must learn from our failings.

In 2007, an insurgency by Sunni extremists threatened to overwhelm the country. Washington realised that the only way to prevent civil war was to gain the support of the country’s Sunni minority by making the Shia-run government include them in Iraq’s political process.

And so, with that bipartisan approach, the U.S. cleverly set about winning the support of the Sunni tribal leaders and helped to arm their militias.

Yet, today’s Western leaders seem unable to learn from that experience nor understand the basic principles that could lead to any kind of stability in Iraq. Unless the Sunnis feel involved in the political process, there will never be peace in the country.

With this in mind, the key to any solution now is for the West to offer military support to the Sunni tribal leaders, who, in return, must dissociate themselves wholesale from the Islamic State. This could well materialise as the majority of Sunnis have been alienated by the organisation’s fundamentalism and extreme brutality.

The fact is that the Islamic State, which is tactically exposed and lacks both sustainability and popular support, is no match for a combination of U.S. intelligence, close combat air support and Special Forces operating on the ground, who would work with local militias.

As we see, the present, albeit somewhat limited, U.S. military intervention is already demonstrating what can be done in the north of Iraq. Not only have the insurgents been halted in their advance towards the Kurdish capital of Irbil but the strategically important Mosul Dam and several villages have now been recaptured by the Kurdish Peshmerga with the help of U.S. air strikes.

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The question for strategists is whether Barack Obama and David Cameron can get their act together by setting clear objectives – and, most crucially promise the Iraqi people that they won’t be abandoned in the same way the Afghans were in 2001. If such objectives can be set then there is every chance that the terrorist organisation running amok in Iraq can be destroyed.

But, we should fear, the signs are not good.

It was, for example, extremely unwise of the prime minister to limit his military options by declaring that he will never have ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq. By saying this, he was excluding the possible involvement of our own Special Forces, who have worked tirelessly and successfully with their U.S. counterparts in similar situations before.

Sadly, also, any combat air support provided by the RAF is likely to be only token, given the disastrous defence cuts that have so significantly reduced the number of combat squadrons.

In any case, military action by itself cannot solve the underlying problems of Iraq.

The election of a new prime minister probably does bode well for Iraq’s future than what it did under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, who deeply divided the country.

Elsewhere, neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait will universally support the return of the Sunnis to the political arena. They were never comfortable with the idea that the Shias should permanently rule Iraq.

Some of these countries may, indeed, have once backed the Islamic State in the hope that Iraq might one day be ruled by the Sunnis. But as events have shown they now don’t have any proper control of an organisation that has become savagely inhuman in its actions.

Ultimately, it will not be the extremist Islamic State which decides the future of Iraq. That will be for the Iraqi people themselves and for their neighbouring countries.

After the turbulent years following the negligent and wrong decision of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to invade their country, that’s the very least the Iraqis deserve from the two men’s successors in Washington and London.

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