Iraq and The Real Middle East Conflict

 

by Barry Rubin

 

Aymenn Jawad is a talented young Arab writer who shows how to analyze regional politics well. His short article on Iraqi politics and how they fit into the Nationalist-Islamist, Iran-Syria-Turkey bloc versus Arab regimes' conflict really makes the issues clear. Recommended reading.

Basically, he shows how Saudi Arabia and Iran are competing for influence in Iraq just as the Saudis were battling with Iran and Syria in Lebanon but gave it up as a lost cause. Meanwhile, the United States and Europe are acting clueless about this huge struggle in the region that will determine its future. The central issue is not Israeli-Palestinian or even, in a sense, Iranian nuclear. It is the massive conflict between two blocs.

One of them is composed of Iran, Syria, the Turkish regime, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Iraqi insurgents. The other consists of all of the Arab regimes except for Syria and the Lebanese March 14 coalition. There are some forces, like Qatar, that play on both sides at times.

The revolutionaries have Islamist ideology and both financial and terrorist backing from Tehran and Damascus. The relative moderates--whose interests in some ways parallel those of Israel and in most ways the West--are hoping for Western backing. Poor relative moderates to depend on such unreliable patrons.

The West continues to see the region largely in terms of the outmoded Arab-Israeli conflict when there is a battle to the death among Arabs and among Muslims going on in front of its eyes. It is often more concerned with engaging or apologizing for the radicals than it is in helping the relative moderates against them.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Human Rights vs. Sharia: Violence Against Women

Human Rights vs. Sharia: Violence Against Women

by Valentina Colombo

The great irony of the recent International Conference on Violence Against Women hosted by the Italian Ministry for Equal Opportunities, is that if the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women (CEDAW), ratified by 185 countries, or over 90% of the United Nations, were implemented, there would be no need for this conference.

One if the main problems is the distance between laws, international conventions and treaties - and their implementation.

In Islamic countries, for example, although 46 out of 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) ratified it, they did so with “reservations.” It seems there are Muslim intellectuals and human rights defenders who are still ambivalent about pursuing engagement with Islam and Islamic law, and gender equality and women’s empowerment in Muslim societies.

Even though the 1990 Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the 1994 Charter on Human Rights, and the 2005 OIC Covenant on the Rights of the Child in Islam indicate that the relationship between Islam and Human Rights is crucial - - due to the place of Islam and Islamic law in the social, cultural, political, and legal affairs of states’ parties - CEDAW has more “reservations” placed on it than any other Human Rights treaty. States’ parties identified as Islamic have placed “reservations” even broader in scope and ground, maintaining that they will not implement any article against the principles of sharia. The Convention ends up, therefore, as though they had never signed it.

In October 2000, even the Saudi Government signed the Convention, but now is Saudia Arabia, as someone said, women are not persons: they cannot drive - they cannot do anything - without their “guardian’s” permission. Is this a contradiction? Not at all: Saudi Arabia signed CEDAW with the following “reservations”:

• “1. In case of contradiction between any term of the Convention and the norms of Islamic law, the Kingdom is not under obligation to observe the contradictory terms of the Convention.

• “2. The Kingdom does not consider itself bound by paragraph 2 of article 9 of the Convention and paragraph 1 of article 29 of the Convention."

Paragraph 2 of article 9 reads as follows:

“States Parties shall grant women equal rights with men with respect to the nationality of their children.”

Paragraph 1 of article 29 reads:

“Any dispute between two or more States Parties concerning the interpretation or application of the present Convention which is not settled by negotiation shall, at the request of one of them, be submitted to arbitration. If within six months from the date of the request for arbitration the parties are unable to agree on the organization of the arbitration, any one of those parties may refer the dispute to the International Court of Justice by request in conformity with the Statute of the Court.”

The conclusion is that Saudi Arabia might just as well not have signed CEDAW.

The reservations coming from Arab-Islamic countries are the main reasons for the high discrimination against women in electoral, nationality and citizenship laws.

The Arab-Islamic world tries to look as if it is not closing its eyes to women’s rights, but at the same time it hesitates in modifying and reforming traditions and laws.

For example, “women’s rights and duties” were the main issues at the June 2004 conference at the Center Abd al-Aziz for National Dialogue in Medina, Saudi Arabia to “build and favor a culture of dialogue in Saudi society.” A surface equality was granted by the presence of 35 men and 35 women, however they discussed all issues from two different rooms connected by a closed-circuit television.

The conference concluded with a clear victory for the conservative position, represented by Shaikh Abd Allah ibn al-Munie’s declaration about women’s right to drive: “If women who want to drive were like women at this conference, we would not have any doubt in allowing it. But we are dealing with teenagers… for this reason we shall be firm in our position to protect them from evil.”

Saudi activist Wajeha al-Huweidar’s statement ought to have been the answer: “All Arab regimes are members of the United Nations and have ratified the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, granting justice and equality, duties and rights to all human beings. However in our male chauvinist countries, women are considered a private property of the family. In all Arab countries, without exception, there is open discrimination against women.”

If we want to reach universal rights.

At the same time we should always make sure that when discussing human rights with people of other cultures, such as Muslims, we speak the same language: that the words we use mean the same thing and have the same values. For example, a former President of the National Society for Human Rights in Saudi Arabia once said: “There are people considering some behaviors like a violation of human rights, while we consider them a way to safeguard human rights - for example executions, amputation of the thief’s hand, flogging of the adulteress. There are people believing that all forms of Koranic punishment violate human rights. We, in Saudi Arabia, belong to the world as far general principles of human rights are concerned. But in our country we follow the laws of Allah, so that what for others is a violation of human rights for us is a duty against whoever has committed a crime”.

The Saudi signature of CEDAW with its reservations regarding sharia, is simply no use.

A statement made by a member if the Norwegian government on 16 July 1990, in response to a similar sharia-based justification by Libya remains current: “The Norwegian government will stress that by acceding to the Convention, a state commits itself to adopt the measures required for the elimination of discrimination, in all its forms and manifestations against women. A reservation by which a State Party limits its responsibilities under the Convention by invoking religious law (Shariah), which is subject to interpretation, modification and selective application in different states adhering to Islamic principles, may create doubts about the commitments of the reserving state to the object and purpose of the Convention. It may also undermine the basis of international treaty law. All states have common interest in securing that all parties respect treaties to which they have chosen to become parties.”

Interpretations of sharia other than the Hanbali-Wahhabi one exist. As far as women are concerned, the 2004 reformed Moroccan Code of Family Law (Mudawana) is a perfect example of the way women can be protected and their condition improved in a Code, following the Malikite interpretation of sharia. In Tunisia the 1956 Code du Statutut Personel is a totally secular document - banning poligamy - which has never been considered anti-Islamic.

When debating human and women’s rights we should demand complete respect for conventions like CEDAW -- with no exceptions and no reservations. Further, the West should start asking for total respect for universal human rights before commencing economic and political relations with countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. In this way the West would help civil society in general, and women in particular, to reach those all-important goals: freedom and democracy.


Valentina Colombo
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors

The Tolerant Pose

by Andrew C. McCarthy


Intolerance is not just part of al-Qaeda, it is part of Islam.

Non-Muslims are barred from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina — not merely barred from building synagogues or churches, but barred, period, because their infidel feet are deemed unfit to touch the ground. This is not an al-Qaeda principle. Nor is it an “Islamist” principle. It is Islam, pure and simple.

“Truly the pagans are unclean,” instructs the Koran’s Sura 9:28, “so let them not . . . approach the Sacred Mosque.” This injunction — and there are plenty of similar ones in Islam’s scriptures — is enforced vigorously not by jihadist terrorists but by the Saudi government. And it is enforced not because of some eccentric sense of Saudi nationalism. The only law of Saudi Arabia is sharia, the law of Islam.

As Sunni scholarly commentary in the version of the Koran officially produced by the Saudi government explains, only Muslims are sufficiently “strict in cleanliness, as well as in purity of mind and heart, so that their word can be relied upon.” Thus, only they may enter the holy cities. Authoritative Shiite teaching is even more bracing. As Iraq’s “moderate” Ayatollah Ali Sistani — probably the world’s most influential Shiite cleric — has explained, the touching of non-Muslims is discouraged, because they are considered to be in the same “unclean” category as “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things].”

These teachings are worth bearing in mind as we listen to the staunch defenses of religious liberty that have suddenly become so fashionable among proponents of the Cordoba Initiative, a planned $100 million Islamic center and mosque to be built on the hallowed ground where remains of the nearly 3,000 Americans killed by Muslim terrorists on 9/11 continue to be found. The most prominent proponent of the project, President Obama, was in high fashion Friday night, as one would expect at a White House gala in observance of Ramadan. “This is America,” he intoned, “and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

The president’s commitment is to a vacant abstraction, not to actual liberty. If his resolve to defend religious freedom were truly unshakable, the last thing he would endorse is the construction of a gigantic monument to intolerance in a place where bigots devastated a city they have repeatedly targeted because of the pluralism and freedom it symbolizes. You can’t aspire to religious freedom by turning a blind eye to the reality of sharia.

Saudi Arabia, the country from which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers hailed, abides no pluralism or religious freedom. Sure, the Saudis will tell you they allow Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims to visit their country, which is awfully big of them. Still, the regime prohibits these infidels from polluting the kingdom with their Bibles, crucifixes, and Stars of David.

Mosque proponents like the Manhattan Institute’s Josh Barro scoff at discomfiting comparisons between religious liberty in the United States and in Saudi Arabia. For them, the prospect of a mosque at Ground Zero is our “opportunity to show how we are better than Saudis.” That misses the point in two ways. First, we don’t need to show that we are better than the Saudis. We permit thousands of Muslim houses of worship in our nation, Muslims are celebrated in our public life, and our military has done more to protect and defend Muslims — including in Saudi Arabia — than any fighting force in history. Every objective person already knows that, and anybody who purports to need convincing will never be convinced.

Second and more significant, the comparison of what is permitted in Manhattan and what is permitted in Mecca is not about the Saudis: It is about Islam. Saudi Arabia does not have any law but sharia. Non-Muslims are discriminated against in the kingdom, not because that’s how the Saudis want it. They are discriminated against because that is how the Koran says it must be.

Sura 9:29, the verse of the Koran that immediately follows the commandment to exclude non-Muslims from holy sites, instructs: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the people of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

The jizya is a poll-tax imposed on dhimmis. Those are non-Muslims permitted to live in Islamic territories. The concept is that all the world will eventually be under the thumb of sharia authorities, with dhimmis tolerated so long as they accept their subordinate legal and social status (“and feel themselves subdued”). The alternative for dhimmis is war or death.

Nevertheless, Muslims understand that this global mission cannot be completed in a day. In an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where they are in a position to impose sharia in full, that is exactly what they do. In other places, the degree of imposition depends on relative Islamic strength, and it increases as that strength increases. Thus, the standard Muslim position on “Palestine,” where Islamic strength is growing but not yet dominant: Muslims are to be permitted to live freely within the Jewish state, but all Jews must be purged from Palestinian territories. Again, that’s not an al-Qaeda position; it’s the mainstream Islamic view. To the extent there is a mainstream dissenting view, it is that the Jewish state should be annihilated immediately — not that the two sides should live in reciprocally tolerant harmony.

In the United States, there is no threat to religious liberty . . . except where there are high concentrations of Muslims. Not high concentrations of al-Qaeda sympathizers — high concentrations of Muslims. As Muslims have flocked to Dearborn, Mich., for example, Henry Ford’s hometown has become infamous for its support of Hezbollah. Recently, four Christian missionaries were arrested by Dearborn police for the crime of handing out copies of St. John’s gospel on a public street outside an Arab festival. The police called it disturbing the peace. But the peace was disturbed only due to the foreboding sense that Muslims might take riotous offense, because sharia forbids the preaching of religions other than Islam.

In Minneapolis, where thousands of Somalis have settled, taxpayers are being forced to support sharia-compliant mortgages and at least one Islamic charter school. Meantime, taxi drivers refuse to ferry passengers suspected of carrying alcohol, and a student in need of a dog’s assistance for medical reasons was driven from school due to threats from Muslim students against him and the animal — because sharia regards canines as unclean.

This aggression is a deliberate strategy, called “voluntary apartheid.” The idea, as explained by influential Sunni cleric Yusuf Qaradawi (the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide), counsels that Muslims in the West must push political leaders to indulge what he claims is their “right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically.” It is what imam Feisal Rauf means when he urges America to become more sharia-friendly by allowing “religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves, according to their laws.”

This is not the promotion of religious liberty. In America, President Obama observed, religious liberty welcomes “people of all faiths.” Contemporary Islam, by contrast, is counseling supremacism. It rips at our seams, demanding that Americans accept parallel Islamic societies, because Muslims must reject the mores of non-Islamic societies.

This same thinking undergirds Islam’s rejection of freedom of conscience, including the Koran’s prescription, in Sura 4:89, of the death penalty for those who renounce their Islamic faith (“They would have you disbelieve as they themselves have disbelieved, so that you may be all like alike. Do not befriend them. . . . If they desert you seize them and put them to death wherever you find them.”) Again, this is not an al-Qaeda doctrine. As the scholar Ibn Warraq observes, it is the interpretation shared by all classical schools of Muslim jurisprudence.

Moreover, the same theory that considers every Muslim to be a Muslim forever — whether he wants to be one or not — analogously holds that if a given inch of land has ever been under Islamic domain, it is Islam’s property in perpetuity. There is a reason Islamic maps of Palestine do not reflect the existence of Israel and that Spain is called al-Andalus.

There are Muslims who want to change this, Muslims who want to evolve their faith into the light of ecumenical tolerance, Muslims who crave true religious liberty and reject sharia’s repression. These reformist Muslims face a daunting challenge, however. The power and money in the Islamic community is in the grip of the supremacists who pressure Muslims to resist assimilating in America.

It is a challenge that the president — if he actually had an “unshakable” commitment to religious freedom — could help the reformers try to surmount. No one credibly questions the legal right of Muslim landowners to use their property in any lawful fashion. Legality is an irrelevant issue, even if the back-tracking Obama now wants to pretend it is the only one he was really talking about on Friday night. The question here is propriety.

This president, uniquely, could have framed that question in the right way. He could have called on Muslims who claim to be moderate to reject Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda explicitly, by name and without equivocation. He could have called for them to support freedom of conscience, to support the right of Muslims to leave the faith. He could have called for Muslims to reject the second-class citizenship to which sharia condemns women and non-Muslims. He could have demanded that they accept the right of homosexuals to live without fear of persecution. He could have called for a declaration that sharia is a matter of private contemplation that has no place in the formation of public policy.

If the Ground Zero mosque were understood as standing for those values, it would be a monument worth having: A testament to the rise of a uniquely American Islam that stands foursquare against the hate-filled ideology we’re fighting, an Islam for which Americans would be proud to fight. But that’s not in the cards for a president whose idea of a symbolic gesture is a bow to the Saudi king and an open door to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The president may not have noticed, but the commitment of the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood to religious intolerance is utterly unshakable


Andrew C. McCarthy
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

What's Hamas good at?

 

by Frimet and Arnold Roth 

 

In a little-noted but sadly familiar incident, the Gaza City clinic of the French medical organization HELP Doctors was raided by men from the Islamic terror organization Hamas on Tuesday morning. The French say the clinic's equipment and files were seized. It had previously been ordered closed by the Islamist Hamas regime after caring for some 5,000 patients since it opened in April 2009. Its role had been to provide free health care to diabetics, according to the organization's announcement. HELP Doctors said the closure "violates international humanitarian law."

 

Back in January 2009, the French medics had a different sense of Gaza's reality: "They were "utterly shocked" by the situation on the ground in the Gaza Strip [this report said at the time]. Several of the doctors said they could not believe "the overuse of power by the Israeli army" while another said he saw "internationally forbidden weaponry [used] against civilians."

 

While they're waiting for the international humanitarian law police to show up and take their statement, someone might point out to the idealistic, dis-equipped French that the goons of Hamas have never had the slightest compunction about undermining, destroying or hampering outside efforts to do for the Palestinian Gazan Arabs what the Hamas regime itself does not.

 

They have, for instance, frequently rocketed the very Israeli power stations that deliver energy to Gaza.

 

To get a sense of what Hamas is really good at, we suggest Googling the expression "Hamas vows revenge". We did it just now. There are about 76,000 matches.

 

 

Frimet and Arnold Roth

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Haredi battalion comes of age on its 10th anniversary

 

by Yaakov Katz 

Netzah Yehuda now has 700 soldiers, including a counter-terror squad.

In March, Lt.-Col. Dror Spiegel finally felt like his battalion had turned into a real fighting machine.

As commander of the IDF's Netzah Yehuda Battalion – formerly known as Nahal Haredi – Spiegel was with his soldiers in the West Bank village of Arane providing support for the Israel Police's elite Yamam counter-terror unit which was trying to apprehend two Palestinian terror suspects.

As the force entered the village it became clear that the wanted men were not in the same home but the Yamam did not have enough manpower to split up its force.

Spiegel did not waste any time and immediately sent a company to one of the homes.

Within minutes his soldiers had succeeded in apprehending the suspect.

"The ability to quickly switch modes and dispatch a force that is flexible and prepared for such a mission means that we are ready for anything that comes our way," Spiegel told The Jerusalem Post this week during a tour of northern Samaria.

The interview with Spiegel marked two occasions – the end of his tenure as battalion commander as well as the 10th anniversary of one of the army's most interesting battalions.

Netzah Yehuda is part of the Kfir Brigade, responsible for most operations these days in the West Bank. Established with a mere 30 soldiers, Netzah Yehuda is today the largest battalion in the IDF, with close to 700 soldiers, including four companies and an elite counter- terror squad.

Most of the battalion's soldiers are Israelis from a haredi or national-religious background.

After they complete two years of service, Netzah Yehuda offers them resources to help them complete matriculation and pre-college studies.

Spiegel took up his post about two years ago when the battalion was still based in the Jordan Valley, where it had been since its establishment.

Together with the previous Kfir brigade commander, Spiegel pushed for the battalion to be relocated. Today the soldiers are operating in one of the most intensely active areas of the West Bank – northern Samaria.

"It wasn't good for us to be in the same place for so long," Spiegel said. "Deploying near Jenin has worked wonders for the unit."

Netzah Yehuda is unique for a number of reasons. It is the only unit in the IDF whose members have to wear a kippa and keep Shabbat. It is also women-free and soldiers eat only glatt kosher food.

Many of the soldiers have families who frown upon their service in the Zionist army. As a result, among the 86 lone soldiers in the unit are 30 who have parents who live in Israel but receive the status, which includes housing, because their families have cut all ties.

"There are many different socio-economic problems," Spiegel said. "Some of the soldiers who go home come back and tell stories of how they were humiliated."

When it was established, the idea was to try and attract haredi youth to the IDF by providing them with a unit in which they could maintain their lifestyle and still defend the country. While it had a slow beginning, today the IDF has to limit the number of soldiers accepted into the unit to 150 each draft, otherwise it would grow out of control.

What will happen over the next 10 years? Spiegel doesn't want to make predictions but says he is sure the battalion will continue to grow.

The IDF is already weighing the establishment of a second battalion and some of the unit's proponents have claimed that in a number of years there will be a haredi brigade.

 

 

 

Yaakov Katz 
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Obama Is No Civil Rights Champion

 

by Caroline Glick

 

President Barack Obama would have us believe that his endorsement of the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero is a testament to his firm belief in civil rights. In one of the White House's attempts to temper the furor elicited by his statement Friday night, White House spokesman Bill Burton said that it wasn't that the President was endorsing the mosque. It was simply a civil rights issue.

 

In Burton's words, "It is not his role as President to pass judgment on every local project. But it is his responsibility to stand up for the Constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans. What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a Mosque."

This position would be defensible if it were genuine. But for the President's claim that he was moved to endorse the plan to build a mosque at a place where Muslims murdered nearly 3,000 people to be credible, then his devotion to the cause of civil rights would have to be absolute and non-discriminating. That is, for it to be credible, we would want to see evidence of him staking out similarly unpopular positions for other groups.

Take Jews for example.

Many people in Obama's own political camp take umbrage at the thought of Jews having the civil rights to exercise their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. They claim that Jews must be prohibited from building and even living in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria just because they are Jewish.

If the President was a real civil rights defender, he could be reasonably expected to call his colleagues out for their bigotry and roundly defend the rights of Jews to exercise their lawful rights.

But of course, the opposite is the case. Obama's signature Middle East policy since his first days in office has been his absolute dedication to the nullification of property and civil rights for Jews in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. Since his earliest days in office, Obama has placed massive pressure on the Israeli government to illegally abrogate the right of Jews as Jews to build on their private property in Judea and Samaria as well as Jerusalem. Obama coerced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take the unprecedented and legally dubious step of freezing all Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria nine months ago.

Netanyahu's freeze was for a ten-month period and is due to end next month. In anticipation of the expiration of the Jewish construction ban, Obama has again been placing massive pressure on Netanyahu to renew the prohibition on Jewish building.

As for Jerusalem – Israel's sovereign capital city and the city that has been the core of Jewish religious and national identity for 3,000 years – Obama fomented a crisis of relations with Israel in March when the municipal planning commission approved a plan to build new homes in a Jewish neighborhood in the city.

It is impossible to square Obama's claim of devotion to civil rights with his rejection of Jewish civil rights in the Jewish state. Indeed, when you compare his willingness to endanger his party's electoral prospects in order to advance the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero with his willingness to destroy relations with Israel to deny Jews their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria it is all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that it is not the cause of civil rights that moves him. Likewise, it is all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that he is willing to take great political and strategic risks to advance the interests of Muslims against those of the American people and their stalwart ally Israel.

 

Caroline Glick

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Competing World Views Tear A "Peace Process" to Pieces

by Barry Rubin

The U.S. announcement inviting Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for direct talks shows quite clearly, though unintentionally, why the talks will fail.

Special Envoy George Mitchell explains:

"We are all well aware that there remains mistrust between the parties, a residue of hostility developed over many decades of conflict, many previous efforts that have been made to resolve the conflict that had not succeeded, all of which takes a very heavy toll on both societies and their leaders. In addition, we all know that, as with all societies, there are differences of opinion on both sides on how best to proceed, and as a result, this conflict has remained unresolved over many decades and through many efforts. We don't expect all of those differences to disappear when talks begin. Indeed, we expect that they will be presented, debated, discussed, and that differences are not going to be resolved immediately."

This is a good explanation that the administration knows how hard it is to bring peace, though it does not jibe well with his saying a few minutes later: "We believe that if those negotiations are conducted seriously and in good faith, they can produce such an agreement within 12 months. And that is our objective."

Of course, Mitchell is right that the task's difficulty shouldn't preclude an attempt to negotiate and that understanding the difficulty is essential to doing a decent job. The one-year thing, though, is nonsense. If negotiations would be conducted seriously an agreement could be reached in a month but there are reasons this has never happened and won't happen for a long time.

As an analyst not a diplomat, I can point out that the problem is not just "mistrust," "residue of hostility," and "differences of opinion," but rather structural impediments to success. Western media and leaders are all too eager to point out alleged problems on the Israeli side—domestic politics—but never really discuss the same thing on the Palestinian side.

I have pointed out HERE that the problems posed by Israeli politics and public opinion for peacemaking are greatly exaggerated, sometimes due to ignorance and sometimes due to a malicious effort to make things seem Israel's fault.

What is lacking, as I've pointed out HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE, is that there is a huge problem on the Palestinian side. This includes:

--Hardline views by the overwhelming majority of Fatah leaders, who do after all control the PA.

--The belief that it is not necessary to negotiate peace because in the shorter-run the PA can get the West to hand them a state on a silver platter and in the longer-run the Palestinians can win the conflict and destroy Israel entirely.

--The almost 100 percent lack of any effort to prepare and moderate Palestinian public opinion by its own leadership, clergy, media, and politicians. There has been an extensive debate in Israel and there is a great willingness to compromise, something simply not there on the Palestinian side. Israelis have empathy and even often sympathy for Palestinians; the reverse is simply not true. It is a cultural and political issue that lies beyond the bounds of any "Politically Correct" "Multicultural" mentality to understand but can be easily demonstrated.

Incidentally, here's one of many such tricks used to avoid understanding these things. Fatah issues a new charter and Western media articles and experts gushed at how moderate it was, including not repeating material from the old charter that called for the use of violence. The only problem is that the new document explicitly stated that all of the old document was still in effect.

--The wooly mammoth, "elephant" is not an adequate description, in the room of a Hamas regime dedicated to warfare, terrorism, and genocide. There is no conceivable mechanism for dealing with this issue.

On that last point here is how Mitchell (didn't) address it:

QUESTION: So you expect Hamas to accept any decision made by President Abbas at these negotiations?

MR. MITCHELL: It is not for me to make decisions for others….With respect to Hamas, let's be clear. Hamas won a legislative election. They acknowledge the continued executive authority of President Abbas and his team, and it is entirely appropriate that we negotiate with the executive head of that government. When Democrats regained control of the Congress in 2006, that didn't end President Bush's tenure as president, and others who wanted to negotiate with the United States negotiated with the legally elected and then-chief of our executive branch of government. And that is the situation here.

Again, Mitchell says what he needs to say, but of course he omits the Hamas violent coup against the PA. Indeed, his statement jibes with the false history of Hamas and its supporters and is rather a mess factually. Abbas's turn came to an end almost two years ago and Hamas could easily argue—and it sure will do so--that he is in office illegally and thus that any agreement he reached with Israel was not valid. By the way, Mitchell states that Hamas does "acknowledge the continued executive authority of President Abbas and his team." I believe that this is false.

In short, Mitchell lays the basis in theory for an Israel-Palestinian treaty leading to a Palestinian state, then Hamas overthrowing the regime to seize control of that state, tossing out the treaty and calling in Iranian and Syrian troops to "protect" Palestine. True, this is leaping ahead in time but this is the kind of thing negotiators need to take into account.

Instead of Mitchell's facile Democrats/Bush analogy, here's a more accurate one: The Democrats regain control of Congress, the two sides reach an agreement, the Democrats than stage an armed coup and murder Republicans by the score then throw the Republicans out of the regions they conquer, and the United States has two governments that are in effect at war with each other. Bush doesn't hold any elections but just keeps extending his term in office.

Would other countries then be able to rely on agreements made with Bush and consider him "legally elected?" Of course not.

Moreover, Mitchell's comparison of Hamas to the Democratic Party reveals the silly habit of making parallels among widely disparate Western and Middle Eastern ideas, institutions, and groups. Hamas is a genocidal, terrorist, revolutionary Islamist group dedicated to wiping out Israel and the Jews, overthrowing all existing Arabic-speaking governments, and creating a totalitarian state ruled by a caliph.

Is this a group Mitchell wants to compare to the Democrats, who are not known for throwing opponents off tall buildings, machine-gunning the enemy wounded in hospital beds, and teaching children to be suicide bombers.

And consider this, too: By forcing Israel to end the high level of sanctions against the Gaza Strip, the West has in effect recognized the Hamas regime as an independent entity that can stay in office for decades. Certainly, it has ceased any effective attempt to bring down that regime. So what is Hamas's incentive to accept a PA-Israel negotiation process that it has denounced as treasonous?

I don't want to spend so much time on this single issue but it is worth reviewing as an example, one of the more obvious cases where the real world and the fantasy world of Washington's Middle East come into collision.

Mitchell also states:

"But we do believe that peace in the Middle East, comprehensive peace, including, but not limited to, an end to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, is very much in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, of all people in the region; it's in the national security interests of the United States, and therefore, we are going to continue to pursue that objective with patience, perseverance, and determination."

Trying to promote negotiations is certainly in the U.S. national security interest. Yet the strategy and tactics used cannot ignore regional realities.

Here's one of them: Is "comprehensive peace" in the interest "of all people in the region?" On one level that seems obvious but on the level of actual reality it is completely false. Consider this: having peace in Europe was arguably in the interests of everyone at all times between, say, between 1337 (start of the Hundred Year's War between England and France) and 1990 (the Cold War's end), yet nonetheless there wasn't peace much of the time.

Why is that? Because there were ideologies, nations, and leaders who thought there was something more important than peace: gains, victories, land, glory, the will of the Creator of the Universe, and other things. Moreover, they perceived that triumph was easy and that they could have everything they wanted. This worldview does not characterize the position today of, at most, more than 10 percent of Israelis (or Americans and Europeans for that matter) but does characterize the position of more than 95 percent of Arabs, Middle East Muslims, and Palestinians.

An element of this doctrinaire, deterministic "even-handedness" and "mirror-imaging" practices by Western governments today is to misunderstand much about the Middle East (and Israel as well) to the point that they fail in their efforts and stumble into crises. This point also applies to their understandings of Islamism, Iran's ambitions, the internal problems of Iraq and Afghanistan, and much more. These mistakes cost lives and produce strategic disasters.

Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, and most of the PA's own Fatah rulers don't think a "comprehensive peace" is in the interests of Palestinians, much less all the peoples of the region. They believe that anyone who does think so should be murdred. They are certain that the elimination of Israel, which they do not number among the "peoples of the region" is in everyone's interest.

Certainly, from the standpoint of 2010, the relatively moderate regimes aren't going to do much to make that happen and there are a number of Arab governments that behind-the-scenes understand the value to Israel for them. But they are generally going to avoid being much help because of their own interests. For them, the conflict with Israel--as long as it is carried out mainly or only on a rhetorical level--is tremendously profitable. The regimes use it to distract from domestic problems and to display their Arab nationalist and Islamic credentials.

These points are just not understood in the West. A typical example: the United States invites the Egyptian and Jordanian governments to observe the new direct talks believing they will pressure the PA and reassure the Israelis into making peace. A far more likely outcome is that they will simply back PA positions, making Israel feel the dice are loaded against it and convincing the PA that it can avoid making peace by using the usual Arab and Muslim levers to guarantee regionwide support for intransigence.

This kind of miscalculation is the problem when people like Mitchell conclude, in his words, that opposition cannot, deter leaders "who…recognize that the interests of their people, the future of their societies rests upon resolving this conflict and achieving the kind of peace and stability and security from which they will all benefit."

But of course it can! Not understanding why is the mistake that has repeatedly led Western leaders and experts to predict diplomacy will succeed only to find, to their puzzlement, that it fails.

Indeed, this factor has been the centerpiece of Middle East history for the last sixty years. Fear of public opinion, fear of Islamists and hardline clerics, fear of rivals taking advantage of their concessions, fear of assassination, fear of political destruction, and other such things have deterred leaders. And those not deterred—King Abdallah of Jordan, Bashir Gemayel of Lebanon, Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt (and, yes, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, too)--have been eliminated as a result.

There is a rather sharp gap between the reality of PA "President" Mahmoud Abbas's political position (hardline) and thinking (scared to an extent which usually brings in a bad word at this point) and what Mitchell portrays it as being.

Again, this does not mean the West should not try to negotiate. It does, however, mean that the West should maintain its own credibility in fighting the radicals (in part, to encourage the relative moderates) and support Israel strongly to show that maximal aims cannot be achieved. The lack of these pillars helps to cripple any peace process.

To summarize, these negotiations are based on a set of false premises:

A. That Abbas is clearly the legitimate leader of the Palestinians who is empowered to make a deal. Mitchell bases this on a false claim that Hamas recognizes the Abbas government as legitimate and by not mentioning Abbas is ruling without elections and beyond the end of his term.

B. The idea that Hamas is not a real problem and will just go away. Wrong again.

C. The belief that Abbas and his colleagues view a formal peace agreement with Israel to be in their interests.  Again wrong. They view such an agreement as dangerous for themselves and involving concessions they don't want to make.

D. The concept that everyone in the region views peace with Israel as in their interests. Again wrong.  The revolutionaries view the active and violent continuation of the conflict to be in their interests while the relative moderates like having the conflict around for their political benefit, especially if they don't have to fight Israel or give money to the Palestinians.

E. The mistaken assumption that a treaty would be the end of the conflict and increase regional stability. In fact, desirable as peace would be, it would provoke a major radical upsurge to stop or destroy the agreement and would mark only the beginning of a struggle over Palestine and policies by the government of Palestine that would probably reignite the conflict.

The text is, "Transcript: Clinton, Special Envoy Mitchell on Push for Middle East Peace, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, August 20, 2010.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Will the Turkish Flotilla Group Be Named as Terrorists?

 

by Jonathan Schanzer

 

It's not every day that House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and Ed Royce (R-CA), the ranking member of terrorism subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, agree on anything. But, when it comes to the terrorist connections of one particular Turkish charity, there's no daylight between them. These legislators recently sent a letter to Stuart Levey, the under secretary for terror finance at the Treasury Department, stating that evidence "strongly supports" designating the Turkish charity IHH (Insan Haklari Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi) under Executive Order 13224 for its support of terrorist groups, and urging Levey to take action.

IHH, by way of background, sponsored the ill-fated flotilla designed to break Israel's blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in late May. And though the Israeli military has come under intense fire for a confrontation that led to nine deaths on the high seas, legislators are increasingly convinced, based on a growing body of evidence, that IHH could meet the Treasury's legal criteria for terrorist designation.

Other influential members of Congress are getting in the act, too. Representative Ron Klein, a Democrat from Florida, has also asked the government to scrutinize IHH. He sent a letter to the State Department last month asking its counterterrorism department to consider a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) listing. Last week, Richard Verma from State's Office of Legislative Affairs responded with a letter indicating that the Turkish charity may not qualify as an FTO, but that "U.S. government agencies are taking a close look at IHH" for Treasury designation because "serious questions of support to terrorist organizations have been raised."

The congressional demand for a designation of IHH may actually be coming at a bad time. Treasury's terrorism designation team, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, is working overtime. On June 16, Treasury announced the designation of dozens of targets tied to the Iranian nuclear program, as part of the Obama administration's larger Iran sanctions strategy. Treasury followed up again on Aug. 3 with a new tranche of targets tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Indeed, Levey and his team have been forced to take analysts off of their regular portfolios to produce these Iran designations, which often entail months of research, not to mention bureaucratic navigation.

This is not to say that IHH isn't worthy of a Treasury designation. Indeed, it is puzzling that IHH has not already been designated. The group advertises the fact that it is a participating member of the Saudi-based umbrella organization Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). On November 12, 2008, Treasury listed the Union as a terrorist entity, stating that the group was "created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization."

The fact that IHH voluntarily belongs to the Union automatically qualified it for designation. Indeed, if IHH has provided any funds to the Union of Good over the years, Treasury can build the case that the Turkish charity has provided financial support to a designated terrorist organization.

In 2008, based on declassified intelligence, Treasury announced that the Union of Good and its network was "facilitating financial transfers ... to Hamas -- and Hamas-controlled organizations," including the al-Salah Society, which was also designated by Treasury in 2007. The Treasury press release estimated that the funds amounted to "tens of millions of dollars a year."

IHH, of course, could argue that it has never contributed funds to the Union of Good. But even if this is true, the Turkish charity is not out of the woods. Union of Good's top officials include Hamas members, as well as Yemeni national Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, who was designated by the U.S. Treasury as a terrorist in 2004 for providing support to al Qaeda. In this way, IHH could be viewed as "owned or controlled" by Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) -- further grounds for designation.

We are also catching a glimpse of what foreign intelligence sources have reported about IHH. French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougière testified in 2001 that IHH had an "important role" in Ahmed Ressam's failed "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999. Brougiere added that the Turkish IHH was "basically helping al-Qaida when [Osama] bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil." So, IHH could also be tagged for providing financial or material support to a designated terrorist group.

Germany banned its IHH affiliate in July, noting the group's close and continuing ties to Hamas, which the European Union classifies as a terrorist organization. We can presume that Germany has shared its findings with the U.S. intelligence community.

The Israelis, who make important contributions to U.S. intelligence, also have their own cause for concern. They banned IHH for its terrorist ties in 2002 and again in 2008. In the aftermath of the skirmish in May, an Israeli military spokesman announced that one of the flotilla passengers was Hussein Urosh, a Turkish IHH member who was trying to smuggle al Qaeda operatives via Turkey to Gaza.

Finally, Treasury's legal team may need to at least mull the tricky question of whether IHH, in its effort to provide various items to the Hamas government in Gaza, was attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization. While Hamas is the de facto government in Gaza, it is also a designated terrorist group, and has been since 1995.

According to a June Supreme Court decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, material support charges can be made even when the support is not financial or military. As Chief Justice John Roberts remarked, when such support lightens the financial burden of a terrorist group, it makes it easier for the group to allocate resources for terrorist activities. Indeed, Roberts stated that such support "helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups -- legitimacy that makes it easier for those groups to persist, to recruit members and to raise funds."

Does all of this mean that IHH is destined for a terrorist designation? Not necessarily. Treasury will need to gather enough reliable intelligence to meet the Justice Department's legal criteria for designation. Indeed, many lawyers will pore over this case before it is through.

Moreover, an interagency working group that includes the CIA, State Department, and the National Security Council will also need to grant its blessings. This can make the process painfully political.

The State Department is particularly good at encumbering the designations. It's a good bet that State will get involved in this one. A designation of IHH would undoubtedly put additional stress on U.S.-Turkish relations, which have been already damaged by the ruling Justice and Development Party's steady drift into the Iranian orbit.

In this case, however, State may not have the upper hand. With the involvement of Representative Berman -- whose House Foreign Affairs Committee oversees State Department operations -- as well as Representatives Royce and Klein -- it is likely that the facts of the case alone will ultimately determine the administrative fate of the Turkish IHH.

 

Jonathan Schanzer, a former intelligence analyst at the U.S. Treasury, is vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Israeli Settlements and International Law

Source: Israeli Foreign Ministry

The Historical Context

Jewish settlement in West Bank and Gaza Strip territory has existed from time immemorial and was expressly recognised as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Jewish people's ancient homeland. Indeed, Article 6 of the Mandate provided as follows:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands not required for public use.

Some Jewish settlements, such as in Hebron, existed throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, while settlements such as Neve Ya'acov, north of Jerusalem, the Gush Etzion bloc in Judea and Samaria, the communities north of the Dead Sea and Kfar Darom in the Gaza region, were established under British Mandatory administration prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. To be sure, many Israeli settlements have been established on sites which were home to Jewish communities in previous generations, in an expression of the Jewish people's deep historic and religious connection with the land.

For more than a thousand years, the only administration which has prohibited Jewish settlement was the Jordanian occupation administration, which during the nineteen years of its rule (1948-1967) declared the sale of land to Jews a capital offense. The right of Jews to establish homes in these areas, and the legal titles to the land which had been acquired, could not be legally invalidated by the Jordanian or Egyptian occupation which resulted from their armed invasion of Israel in 1948, and such rights and titles remain valid to this day.

International Humanitarian Law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip

International humanitarian law prohibits the forcible transfer of segments of the population of a state to the territory of another state which it has occupied as a result of the resort to armed force. This principle, which is reflected in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, was drafted immediately following the Second World War. As International Red Cross' authoritative commentary to the Convention confirms, the principle was intended to protect the local population from displacement, including endangering its separate existence as a race, as occurred with respect to the forced population transfers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary before and during the war. This is clearly not the case with regard to the West Bank and Gaza.

The attempt to present Israeli settlements as a violation of this principle is clearly untenable. As Professor Eugene Rostow, former Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs has written: "the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there" (AJIL, 1990, vol. 84, p.72).

The provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding forced population transfer to occupied sovereign territory cannot be viewed as prohibiting the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they, or their ancestors, had been ousted. Nor does it prohibit the movement of individuals to land which was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state and which is not subject to private ownership. In this regard, Israeli settlements have been established only after an exhaustive investigation process, under the supervision of the Supreme Court of Israel, designed to ensure that no communities are established on private Arab land.

It should be emphasised that the movement of individuals to the territory is entirely voluntary, while the settlements themselves are not intended to displace Arab inhabitants, nor do they do so in practice.

Repeated charges regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements must therefore be regarded as politically motivated, without foundation in international law. Similarly, as Israeli settlements cannot be considered illegal, they cannot constitute a "grave violation" of the Geneva Convention, and hence any claim that they constitute a "war crime" is without any legal basis. Such political charges cannot justify in any way Palestinian acts of terrorism and violence against innocent Israelis.

Politically, the West Bank and Gaza Strip is best regarded as territory over which there are competing claims which should be resolved in peace process negotiations. Israel has valid claims to title in this territory based not only on its historic and religious connection to the land, and its recognized security needs, but also on the fact that the territory was not under the sovereignty of any state and came under Israeli control in a war of self-defense, imposed upon Israel. At the same time, Israel recognizes that the Palestinians also entertain legitimate claims to the area. Indeed, the very fact that the parties have agreed to conduct negotiations on settlements indicated that they envisage a compromise on this issue.

Israeli-Palestinian Agreements

The agreements reached between Israel and the Palestinians contain no prohibition whatsoever on the building or expansion of settlements. On the contrary, it is specifically provided that the issue of settlements is reserved for permanent status negotiations, which are to take place in the concluding stage of the peace talks. Indeed, the parties expressly agreed that the Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction or control over settlements or Israelis, pending the conclusion of a permanent status agreement.

It has been charged that the prohibition on unilateral steps which alter the "status" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which is contained in the Interim Agreement and in subsequent agreements between the parties, implies a ban on settlement activity. This position is disingenuous. The building of homes has no effect on the status of the area. The prohibition on unilateral measures was agreed upon in order to ensure that neither side take steps to change the legal status of this territory (such as by annexation or unilateral declaration of statehood), pending the outcome of permanent status negotiations. Were this prohibition to be applied to building, it would lead to the ridiculous interpretation that neither side is permitted to build homes to accommodate for the needs of their respective communities.

Israeli Foreign Ministry

copyright 2010 The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise

Iraq and the Middle Eastern Cold War

 

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

With the official end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, what bodes for Iraq's future in terms of its relations to other nations in the Middle East? One useful way to examine this question is through the lens of what Daniel Pipes describes as the present "Middle Eastern Cold War."

This new Cold War represents the current ideological division in the Middle East between the "revolutionary bloc," led chiefly by Iran, Syria, and more recently Turkey, and the "status-quo bloc," led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While most Sunni Arab states align themselves with the "status-quo bloc," there are notable exceptions in that Qatar and Oman back the "revolutionary bloc," while Libya simply sits on the sidelines.

The Middle Eastern Cold War has manifested itself in recent years in several ways, including the ongoing tension in Lebanon between Saad Hariri's coalition government and pro-Syrian factions like Hezb'allah, the contest between Fatah and Hamas for the Palestinian leadership, and the conflict in Yemen between Iranian-backed Shi'a Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed central government of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

However, the most recent sign of this Cold War could well lie in Iraq as Saudi Arabia and Iran jostle for influence. With the ongoing political stalemate that has created a power vacuum, it is Saudi Arabia's hope that the current Shi'a Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki does not retain his position in power for fear that he will tilt Iraq towards Iran's regional bloc. Meanwhile, Iran not only wishes for him to remain as prime minister, but also hopes for Maliki's State of Law (SOA) coalition and the Sadrist Iraqi National Alliance (INA) to form the backbone of a new government, whereas the U.S. views a coalition between SOA and Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya bloc as the best option.

Indeed, on repeated occasions, Saudi officials have been open in expressing their dislike for Maliki. For instance, in May, former Saudi intelligence chief Turki Al-Faisal accused Maliki of attempting to "deny the Iraqi people their legitimately elected government," meaning that Allawi should be given the right to form a government. In addition, the Saudi government has made a series of goodwill gestures, including receiving several Iraqi politicians such as Allawi and the president of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Massoud Barzani on visits to Riyadh in an attempt to contain Iran's influence in the country. Winning over the latter is viewed as especially important since the Kurdish parties are reported to have extensive economic ties with Iran that date back at least two decades, above all in the smuggling of oil and other refined petroleum products to Iran.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia has been trying to take advantage of recent, tougher sanctions against Iran to expand its influence in Iraq through economic cooperation with the country. For example, in July, a Saudi airline launched the first direct flights to Iraq in almost twenty years, having been suspended in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Furthermore, Saudi food firms like Almarai have become involved in the export of foodstuffs to Iraq via Kuwait and Jordan. Simultaneously, however, Saudi Arabia is concerned that Iraq's aspiring potential to produce some 10-12 million barrels of oil a day could dislodge it from its position as a leader of the OPEC cartel. Hence, cooperation in the field of oil production is nonexistent.

Despite these measures undertaken by Saudi Arabia, Iran and the "revolutionary bloc's" influence on Iraq is all too evident. Iran has repeatedly urged the Shi'a parties in Iraq to put aside their differences and form a ruling Shi'a-led government, fearing that allowing Allawi's Iraqiya bloc to form a government will lead to a resurgence of Sunni minority rule and Baathism. Also noteworthy, besides Kurdish smuggling of petroleum to Iran, are the already close economic ties between the key players of the "revolutionary bloc" and Iraq that will likely grow in the future as Iran, Turkey, and Syria continue to restrict Iraq's water supplies through building dams on the Tigris and Euphrates and diverting water for irrigation projects. This could create future "oil for water" trade schemes. Moreover, there are the Iranian-backed "Special Groups" like the Kataib Hezb'allah that can resort to insurgent-style attacks to quash any efforts by the Sunni Arabs to exert their diminished political influence and tilt Iraq towards the "status-quo bloc."

Thus, it is possible that Iraq will emerge as a sort of theatre of proxy warfare between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the near future. Nevertheless, it is improbable that the struggle will be prolonged, as Iran, the leader of the "revolutionary bloc," and most of the Shi'a population of Iraq share the goal of ensuring Shi'a dominance in the country, such that Iraq, under a Shi'a-led government, will likely become an auxiliary for the "revolutionary bloc." This outcome becomes much more conceivable when one considers that Iran could well have nuclear weapons in the next few years, which will make it much harder for its rivals to contain Iranian influence in Iraq.

 

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at Middle East Forum.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.