Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: How Iran Could Save the Middle East

by Jeffrey Goldberg
How Iran Could Save the Middle East
Not long after the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the Iraq War, I
attended a dinner in Ramallah, the capital of the rump state of
Palestine, hosted by a sophisticated and aggressively secular leader
of Fatah, the main faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The guests were like-mindedly secular, and the conversation was
amiable and reality-based, until someone raised the subject of what
George W. Bush’s actual goals in the Middle East might be. The host,
growing angry, accused Bush of harboring entrenched and violently pro-
Shia sympathies. I said that this was implausible, for any number of
reasons. Another guest, an official of the Palestinian Authority,
agreed with our host. He argued that the Bush administration was
secretly motivated by a desire to establish a Shia state in the Arab
heartland in order to create a new Washington-Baghdad-Tehran axis.
Such an axis would replace the existing Washington-Riyadh-Amman-Cairo
axis, and would serve both America’s oil interests and its desire for
vengeance against the radical Sunnis who attacked America on September
11, 2001.
Very Kissingerian in its amoral convolution, and undoubtedly beyond
the capacities of the planning branches of the Bush administration.
Then the real issue erupted into view.
“The Shia are apostates,” the host said. “Bush is giving power to
apostates. They want to use Iraq as a base to convert Sunnis.”
This man, in a previous, Beirut-based life, had been a Marxist, so I
couldn’t understand why the particular brand of opiate mattered to
him. To these secular men, I thought, the assorted confessional
categories—Shia, Sunni, Sufi, and for that matter Presbyterian and
Lubavitcher—were interchangeable and identically passé. I asked if his
problem might be ethnic, rather than religious: Iran is Persian, not
Arab, and the two civilizations are historically competitive. “Of
course,” came the answer, but I was missing the subtlety: a
Palestinian cannot become Persian, but he can become Shia. And this,
to a Sunni Muslim—even to a wine-drinking, pork-eating Marxist Sunni
Muslim—is a reprehensible idea.
This dinner occurred shortly after 2 million Shia had visited Karbala,
a Shia holy city in Iraq, to commemorate the martyrdom of a crucial
Shia saint. It was the first time so many Shia had gathered in Karbala
in recent memory; Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, had prevented such
gatherings. President Bush saw this as a triumph: “Many Iraqis are now
reviving religious rituals which were forbidden by the old regime,” he
said. “See, a free society honors religion.” But the sight of such
Shia power, however moving to George Bush, was intensely upsetting to
America’s Sunni allies in places like the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt,
and Saudi Arabia. At dinner that night, the message, in its purest
distillation, was simple: Who do these uppity Shia think they are?
Shiism, whose followers constitute a mere 15 percent of the world’s
1.4 billion or so Muslims, long ago acquiesced to second-class status
in the Arab world. But then came 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini seized
power in Iran and sought to export the ideology of his country’s
Islamic revolution to Muslims everywhere, even to Sunni Muslims. It
was an unlikely goal. Centuries of blood-spattered encounters,
prompted by deeply felt doctrinal differences, made Khomeini’s vision
seem fantastical.
Most Westerners are insensitive to these doctrinal differences,
viewing them as dry technicalities rather than matters of cosmological
importance. The Sunni-Shia split dates back to the seventh-century
dispute over who was meant to be the Prophet Muhammad’s rightful
successor. Today’s Shia are descended from those who believed that
Muhammad had chosen his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as his heir. This
was a minority view in the days following the prophet’s death, and one
of his lieutenants, Abu-Bakr, was made caliph and successor to
Muhammad instead. The schism became permanent after the Battle of
Karbala in 680, when Ali’s son Hussein was killed by the caliph’s
soldiers.
The conflict between Sunni and Shia is the most consequential in the
Middle East because it is so profound and elemental. But precisely
because it is so intractable, it might hold the key to solving another
seemingly eternal Middle East conflict, the one between Muslim and
Jew. The definitive Middle East cliché is, of course, “The enemy of my
enemy is my friend.” Well, it turns out that today, more than at any
other time in the ruinous 100-year encounter between Arabs and Jews on
the strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River,
the two parties in the dispute have a common enemy: the Shia Persian
Islamic Republic of Iran. President Obama’s skills and charisma just
might bring Sunni Arabs and Israeli Jews together, but he will be
helped inestimably if he considers that the road to peace runs not
through Jerusalem but through Karbala. Consider the possibility of a
grand, if necessarily implicit, Jewish-Sunni alliance as a gift to
Obama from his predecessor.
My dinner companions were wrong; George Bush did not mean, by invading
Iraq, to empower Iran. But they were right about the war’s effect:
Bush is the inadvertent father of the first Arab Shia state. And the
foothold he provided Iran in Arab Iraq has made Tehran a surging power
in the Persian Gulf.
At a Pew Forum discussion on Iran and the Middle East last December,
Vali Nasr, the Iran expert (and adviser to Richard Holbrooke, the
State Department’s envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan), talked about
the rise of Iran, and the marginalization of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Nasr argued, convincingly, that most Arab states have a
deeper interest in containing Iran than they do in containing Israel.
“Once upon a time we used to think—and some people still do—that the
Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to solving all the problems of the
region: terrorism, al-Qaeda, Iran, and Iraq,” he said. “I think the
Persian Gulf is the key to solving the Arab-Israeli issue. All the
powers that matter—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and even the good news of the
region: Dubai, Abu Dhabi, etc.—are all in the gulf. And all the
conflicts that matter to us—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran—are in the
gulf and then to the east.”
Israel, of course, considers Iran a threat to its existence. “Can
Israel flourish—survive and flourish—in a Middle East in which Iran,
under its current leadership, is nuclear?” asked Benjamin Netanyahu,
the Israeli prime minister, when I visited him earlier this spring. “I
think it’s much better not to get to that point.”
The remarkable thing about this moment in the Middle East is that Arab
leaders speak about Iran more critically than even Netanyahu does. In
March, Morocco broke diplomatic relations with Iran over what it
claimed were attempts by Iranian Shia to convert Moroccan Sunnis; in
Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence services spent the
spring breaking up Hezbollah cells (Hezbollah being the Lebanese Shia
proxy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps). “Even if we forget
that Iran is trying to obtain a nuclear capability, all gulf and Arab
countries are extremely unhappy with the Iranian involvement in our
region,” a senior official of the United Arab Emirates recently told
me. “We see this today in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Yemen. We just saw the
Moroccans breaking diplomatic ties with Iran because of that. We’ve
been seeing that in one way or the other in Afghanistan, in Pakistan,
in Sudan.”
In 2006, Mubarak accused Arab Shia of being loyal to Iran. “Definitely
Iran has influence on Shiites,” he said. “Shiites are 65 percent of
the Iraqis. Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not to the
countries they are living in.” And Yusuf Qaradawi, a leading Sunni
scholar, said last year, “Shiites are Muslims, but they are heretics,
and their danger comes from their attempts to invade Sunni society.
They are able to do that because their billions of dollars trained
cadres of Shiites proselytizing in Sunni countries.”
Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, recently told me that he has
sensed an oncoming revolution in Sunni thinking. “For the first time,
the majority of the Arab world thinks that Iran is the real danger,
not Israel. Seventy percent of the Arabs are Sunnis. The Sunnis look
upon us, whether they say it or not, not as a problem but as a hope.”
Peres may be overstating, but moderate Arab leaders would obviously
like a Sunni-Jewish alliance: Israeli compromise—an agreement, for
instance, to freeze settlement growth on the West Bank—would prove to
their pro-Palestinian constituents that Arab states, and not Iran, are
guarantors of Palestinian interests, and it would allow them to deepen
their subterranean military-intelligence connections with Israel on
the Iran question. Such an alliance has even more obvious strategic
advantages for Israel: Netanyahu has said he will lobby Europe, China,
and Russia on the necessity for strong action to stop the Iranian
nuclear program. His case would be strengthened immeasurably if he
could make these arguments in concert with Arab leaders.
So, how to make use of what the Middle East expert Martin Indyk calls
the “symbiotic anxiety” shared by Israel and its Sunni Arab
adversaries? It might be too late, of course, to forge a Sunni-Jewish
alliance, though not because the two parties hate each other; hate has
never stopped the formation of pragmatic alliances in the Middle East.
It might be too late because the Arab enmity for Israel in the wake of
last December’s Israeli attacks in Gaza might make it impossible for
Arab governments to be seen entering even a tacit alliance with
Israel. “It’s a good time in theory for something like this, but it
won’t happen now unless Israel makes certain strategic decisions to
bring real compromises to the table,” says Abdel Monem Said Aly, of
the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, in Cairo. “It
is a difficult situation because Iran has presented itself as a
guardian of Islamic and, in particular, Palestinian interests by
taking the maximum stands, however hollow. If Israel and the
Palestinians can be seen making progress, there is a chance. But this
requires Israel to rethink its strategic priorities.”
There are other reasons why such an alliance could prove to be
chimerical. Half of the future state of Palestine is under the control
of a Sunni fundamentalist group, Hamas, that is theologically opposed
to the Shia dogma, but more than happy to take Iranian money and
weapons. In April, an Arab leader told me he expects Iran to continue
encouraging Hamas—as well as the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon—to subvert
any upcoming negotiations. “There will be another round of the Israeli-
Iranian war this year,” he predicted.
Which makes the effort to forge an alliance between Israel and its
Arab adversaries even more vital. Trust-building steps must be taken
more or less concurrently, but Israel is in a position to make a
first, decisive step, by freezing settlement growth on the West Bank.
Arab leaders who don’t now have diplomatic relations with Israel are
ready to reciprocate with direct flights between their capitals and
Tel Aviv, and a host of other symbolic yet important moves. But there
is an even more dramatic way to move forward on the peace process,
while at the same time marginalizing Iran: demarcate the future
borders of the state of Palestine. David Makovsky, one of the most
respected experts on the peace process (and the co-author of a new
book, Myths, Illusions, and Peace, about how to revive the process),
suggests that freezing settlements should not become an end in itself.
“There is a convergence of interests between the Arabs and Israelis on
Iran. As such, this moment is a gift that shouldn’t be wasted,”
Makovsky says. “The two sides need to put their differences in
perspective to address the common challenge.” He suggests leapfrogging
the settlements issue and moving to border demarcation. “This is not
like the issues of Jerusalem and the status of refugees or security
arrangements,” he said. “Both sides have already come very close on
the West Bank land issue.” The former Israeli prime minister Ehud
Olmert, before leaving office, suggested that the future state of
Palestine be built on 93 percent of the West Bank, and receive
additional territory from Israel in a land swap.
The history of Middle East peacemaking is littered with missed
opportunities, and the shared challenge of an ascendant Iran might not
be enough to induce Arabs and Israelis to make common cause. Martin
Indyk recalls that Yitzhak Rabin argued at the beginning of the Oslo
peace process “that Iran represented the real threat to Israel, and so
it made sense for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and their
Arab allies in order to face together the threat from Iran.” We know
how Oslo ended. On the other hand, there is a substantial difference
between 1993 and this moment. “In the 1990s, the Arabs didn’t feel the
same pressure from Iran that Israel felt,” Indyk says. “Today, thanks
to our mistake in Iraq, the Arabs feel that pressure just as
intensely.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200907/israel-sunni

 minoranza araba.
insomma, uno zio Tom palestinese che dica zì badrone. Il DNA brit non
tradisce....

 ha il petrolio, faccedacazzo yankee?
Se ha solo scopo pacifico, perch� l'Iran fa tante difficolt� ad 
acconsentire le ispezioni, che pure sono obbligatoriamente previste dal 
trattato NTP che l'Iran ha volontariamente e liberamente sottoscritto?
MGOK

 acconsentire le ispezioni,
su quale pianeta?

 su quale pianeta?
Non leggi i giornali, capisco..
MGOK

 Non leggi i giornali,
io li leggo, e leggo che il nuovo capo dell'AIEA ha detto che l'IRan è
perfettamente in regola. Se tu leggi le veline nazicon, che raccontano
da 10 anni che tra 24 ore l'Iran nuclearizzerà Gerusalemme, cazzi
tuoi...

 tuoi...
Mi sa che non leggi (o keggi solo quel che vuoi vedere tu).
MGOK
-- 
D'Alema don't surf!
courtesy by Yossarian

 Mi sa che non leggi (o keggi solo quel che vuoi vedere tu).
detto da un verme negazionista...
PLONK

 Infatti. Le dichiarazioni di El Baradei di una diecina di giorni fa
El Baradei è stato sostituito dal giapponese Amano (un nome che sta
molto simpatico a giovannino), che la pensa diversamente:
http://www.affaritaliani.it/ultimissime/flash.asp?ticker=030709192000
e lo stesso Mossad parla di nucleare non prima del 2014
http://www.italia-news.it/index.php?idcnt=22080&idct=4
essere più realisti del re non vi aiuta molto...

 anni
avere l'atomica non vuol dire vaporizzare. Anche perchè Ahmacoso è
ebreo e non vuole distruggere Israele, ma l'Iran, come dicono i vostri
amici "rivoluzionari" di Teheran. Un'altra volta sceglieteveli
meglio...

Nuovo articolo su Terra Santa Libera Appeal from Yemen for Easter : Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil , a Catholic priest , is still missing and threatened to be crucified by Daesh - by terrasantalibera  - Daesh, in Yemen on behalf of the al-Saud family , is committing , as always , horrendous crimes , in the conspiracy of silence by the Western media enslaved to U.S. and Israel
 
~ One week after the attack on the house of the Missionaries of Charity in YEMEN Aden ,  there is still no news of the Indian Salesian missionary Fr Tom Uzhunnalil . In addition to the sisters , the driver and at least two other Ethiopian employees of the community were killed during the terrorist attack . The Mother Superior of the convent escaped. The elderly and disabled people housed at the community are all alive . As yet , there is no news of Fr Uzhunnalil who has been residing at the Sisters' convent since the Holy Family church in Aden was looted and set on fire by unidentified armed men last September .  
 
Also 4 Missionary Sisters of Charity , the congregation founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta , were murdered by a group of armed men who attacked their convent , in the Yemeni city of Aden  ...
 
 
terrasantalibera | 26 marzo 2016 h 14:39 | Etichette: Chretiens , Christian martyrs  , Christian martyrs in Yemen , Christians , Crimes against Humanity , Fr Thomas Uzhunnalil, Martyrs , Missionary Sisters of Charity Killed  , Syrian Patriots , War crimes , Yemen | Categorie : Christian martyrs, Yemen | URL: 
http://wp.me/pVY5r-1Oi
 
 
Non riesci a cliccare ? Copia e incolla questo URL nel tuo browser: 
https://terrasantalibera.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/fr-tom-missing/
 
 

" Gli Ebrei sono l' eterno futuro di tutti " ( Massimo Cacciari ) 
 E' ora : TUTTI leggano la Meghillàh Estèr e conoscano le vicende di Purìm . 
 
 Egitto ospita già 5 milioni di " MIGRANTI " . Era pronto a accoglierne altri . 
 La U EURO stava per dare al Cairo 3 miliardi EURO per ajutare ciò . 
 
 i GIOVANI TURCHI , agenti di ERDOGANAV in Egitto , hanno torturato a morte Giulio REGENI , 
 sganciando ATOMICHE sui buoni rapporti fra Egitto e Italia e ACCIDENTE in genere . 
 Così , guarda caso , i miliardi vanno a Erdoganav . 
 Meglio accogliere Turchia in U EURO . Così Erdoganav e i suoi tirapiedi non potranno più 
 rispondere alla " ingerenze nei fatti nostri " : " Fatevi i cazzi vostri " . 
 
 Votiamo NO ! Petrolio cala prezzo e prepotenza se ne trovi appo Arezzo e Potenza ! 
 Votiamo NO ! Più ce n' è , meglio : petrolio cala prezzo e prepotenza . Emiri sceicchi fachiri e crumiri invitano a votar SI' , coi soliti utili
 idionoti tirapiedi capaci soltanto di fare bolsi giuochi di parole sui cognomi di avversarj più INTER ligenti . A proposito : puzzano mani
 e piedi di EMIRI Califfi & Co . Amano poco acqua e sapone . Dessi fossili potranno usare le loro fonti fossili per FARSI pediluvio e af FINA . 
Petrolio cala prezzo sopra tutto perchè Refluopetrolio & ECAT Gatto Einstein Fusione Fredda F5 realizzati da HAR Husserl Andrea Rossi filano e bene . 
Nel Mondo todo tondo e non soltanto in USA veicoli natanti velivoli etc filano a tutta birra sanza bisogno di fossili grazie a Fusione Fredda . 
Prendiamocelo noi qui vicino il greggio che ci basta . Ormai è soltanto un triste ricordo la penuria . Evviva OIL GLUT ! 
evviva TRI volu ZION . Ormai petrolio è prezioso soltanto per curare emorroidi sotto code e sui cranj .
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