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In 1609 a terrible thing happened. Not terrible in the manner that great wars are terrible, but in the way that opening Pandora’s Box was terrible: King James I of England discovered that dividing people on the basis of religion worked like a charm, thus sentencing the Irish to almost four centuries of blood and pain. 

If the Bush administration is successful in its current efforts to divide Islam by pitting Shiites against Sunnis it will revitalize the old colonial tactic of divide and conquer, and maintain the domination of the Middle East by authoritarian elites allied with the U.S. and the international energy industry.  

Its vehicle, according to the New York Times, is an “American backed alliance” of several Sunni-dominated regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, “along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel.” 

The anti-Shiite front, according to the Saudi-owned news site, Elaph, will also include Turkey and Pakistan.  

The target is not simply Iran, but the so-called “Shiia Crescent,” a term first coined by King Abdullah of Jordan. The “Crescent” includes Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Alawai-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Alawites are of Shiia origin. Suddenly rhetoric like the “eastern tide,” and the “Persian menace” have begun appearing in official newspapers in the region, despite the fact that the average Arab does not view Iran as a threat. 

A recent Zogby International poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) found that close to 80 percent of those polled considered the United States and Israel the biggest threats to their security, while only 6 percent listed Iran. Further, fewer than 25 percent believe Iran should be pressured to halt its nuclear program, while 61 percent think Iran has the right to a nuclear program, even if it results in nuclear weapons.  

In fact, Iran’s opposition to the United States and support for the Palestinians is widely popular in the region. 

Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly, Omayma Abdel-Latif, project coordinator for the Carnegie Middle East Center, says, “The consensus in both Sunni and Shiia circles appears to be that attempts to emphasize Sunni-Shiia rivalries are intended to deflect attention from both the U.S. occupation of Iraq and continued Israeli aggression. That the United States is working to fuel such tensions is almost an article of faith for Muslims on both sides. In its attempt to create an anti-Iran alliance, they say, the U.S. is resorting to a strategy which aims to raise the specter of sectarianism across the Muslim world.”  

Abel-Latif is not alone in her analysis. “One might be forgiven for surmising that the current thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East and through the Muslim world is to exacerbate and instrumentalize Sunni-Shiite divisions,” says Middle East expert and author Fred Reed. 

While much of the “Shiia threat” talk seems aimed at Iran, Hezbollah and Syria—the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is generally excluded because it is allied with the current occupation forces led by the U.S. and Britain—the real target may be a good deal bigger. 

“Could it be that the U.S. endgame is to weaken Islam from within,” asks Lebanese writer Jihad Azine in An-Nahar, “and divert attention from targeting U.S. interests to targeting the Shiia?”  

One major concern for the U.S. is oil. While oil production in the United States, Mexico, and the North Sea is declining, U.S. consumption is predicted to increase by one-third over the next 20 years. By 2020, two-thirds of all U.S. oil will be imported, and since 65 percent of the world’s remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East, one doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude a strategy of divide and conquer is aimed at keeping strategic control of those resources.  

Keeping up tensions in the Middle East is also enormously lucrative for U.S. arms companies. Since 2006, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman have spent—or will over the next year— $138 billion on arms purchases. 

The division between Sunnis and Shiia dates from shortly after the Prophet Mohammad died in 632. But as London School of Economics Middle East expert Fred Halliday points out, the distinctions “are small, far less than those between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity,” and conflict between the two “is essentially a recent development, a product of the Middle East political crisis in recent decades.” 

Halliday argues that the wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan encouraged the division because militant Sunni groups were the heart of the resistance. The real divisions may be small, but religious conflict has always been a surrogate for something else. In Ireland it divided native Irish from Protestant settlers and kept the two at one another’s throats. In Egypt, the British manipulated Copts against Muslims; in Cyprus, Christian Greeks against Muslim Turks.  

In its campaign to divide and conquer, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration has ended up bolstering “Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.” 

Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, says, “The Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite cold war. The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq; it’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated.” 

“Blowback” has already happened. As Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations told the New York Times, “Who cannot remember that to contain the so-called ‘Shiite Crescent’ after the 1979 revolution, the extremism of the fundamentalist Salafi movement was nourished by the West—only to transform into al Qaeda and the Taliban? Why should the same policy in the same region procure any different results now?” 

While the Shiia are represented as a single entity, in fact there are enormous differences among Shiia communities. They are a majority in Iran, but Persians are ethnically different than Arabs. The Shiia constitute the bulk of the Muslim population in Lebanon, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been sharply critical of Iraq’s Shiia government for working hand in glove with the U.S. occupation. 

In any case, Shiia make up only 12 to 15 percent of the Muslim world and, outside Iran and Iraq, constitute a majority only in Yemen. Traditionally they “are under represented,” according to Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Socially and economically, Shiia communities are more marginalized, less educated, and poorer.” 

The fact that Shiia communities—particularly in Lebanon and Iraq, but also in Saudi Arabia—are suddenly on the radar screen has less to with any kind of Iran-driven conspiracy than with growing resistance to the sect’s traditionally second-class status in the Middle East. The “divisions” are political and economic, not sectarian, says Abdel-Latif. 

According to Halliday, Shiites and Sunnis have intermarried and shared holy sites for centuries. “Actual and direct conflict between Sunni and Shiia (as distinct from suspicion and communal difference) has until recently been remarkable by its absence.” 

But as the Irish found out to their woe, small differences, if linked to a wider policy, can turn esoteric matters of theology into a life and death matter. “These fires, once lit, can destroy forms of co-existence that have existed for centuries,” points out Halliday. 

And no one can be certain where those fires will spread and who they will burn.