Nawaf Obaid — Iran’s Syrian Power Grab and Saudi Arabia

Dark clouds continue to gather over the Middle East.

Iran’s current government is attempting to overthrow a balance of power that has endured for some 1,400 years – and Saudi Arabia, as the cradle of the Muslim world, will not allow it.….

Nawaf Obaid traces the history from the Sunni-Shia divide that began after the passing of the prophet. This piece is written from the Sunni point of view and puts current events in a religious perspective with roots extending back to the time of the prophet.

And, of course, Zionist base their claim to Israel as God-given.

No room for compromise in this kind of conflict.

It's a fight to the death and the West is entangled in it because oil and gas. If that weren't complicated enough, Russia and China are being drawn in, too.

A further complicating factor, which the author omits, is interjection of Western Christianity into the historical conflict through the crusades.  While the West has largely forgotten about this tumultuous historical period, Muslims haven't.

As the Sunni world’s most influential country, Saudi Arabia knows that it must do what it takes to limit Iran.

Armageddon anyone?

Project Syndicate
Iran’s Syrian Power Grab and Saudi Arabia

Nawaf Obaid | visiting fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government

See also

More history, this time about Western involvement since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

By formally abolishing the Syrian-Iraqi border ISIS doubtless hopes to evoke memories of the Ottoman era before supposedly artificial states were constructed for the convenience of European powers—a time when frontiers were porous and the ways of Islam were universally observed. The fatal flaw in this utopian vision—apart from its obvious historical inaccuracy—is its failure to recognize the division between Sunnism and Shiism that long predated Western interventions in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, Iraqi tribes, traditionally hostile to government, began adopting Shiism in large numbers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However much the leaders of ISIS seek to draw on the imagery of an international Arab jihad rolling back a century of Western imperialism, the growth of ISIS feeds on these sectarian tensions that have been reanimated across the region. Politically, the jihadists have gained support from the widespread hatred of the Shiite cronyism of the Maliki regime, which replaced the cronyism of Saddam Hussein’s, as well as from the brutality of its counterpart in Damascus. And to the extent that foreign powers are driving the situation, the underlying dynamic flows less from the West than from the rivalry between the Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on one side and Shiite Iran on the other.

The New York Review of Books
The Map ISIS Hates
Malise Ruthven

ht Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution