Tweet

BOB ABERNETHY, host: There was jubilation in the streets of Egypt Friday (February 11) after President Hosni Mubarak finally decided to step down. He handed power to the military’s Supreme Council. The Council pledged to meet protestors’ demands for a peaceful transfer of authority that will lead to a free democracy. Meanwhile, debate continues over the role religion could play in a new government. Kim Lawton and I examine the week’s dramatic developments in Egypt with Geneive Abdo. She’s a longtime Middle East reporter and author of the book “No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam.” She’s a fellow and analyst at the Century Foundation and National Security Network. Welcome to you.

GENEIVE ABDO: Thank you very much.

ABERNETHY: Geneive, one way or another there’s going to be a new government in Egypt. What can we say about the degree of religious influence that we can expect in that government?

ABDO: Well that, of course, Bob, is the question everyone’s been asking, and I think that there’s no doubt, I mean as everyone has been reading about this big organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, that they will have a role in the government. I mean there’s no doubt about that.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: And that’s different, right? I mean, they’ve been not having an influence, and so this would be a change?

ABDO: Yes, I mean, they’ve been a banned party, so this is a huge, huge change in Egyptian history, and they’ve been in Egypt since the 1920s, so this will be their first time to actually enter government.

ABERNETHY: There was a poll that came out this week taken by phone in Cairo and Alexandria asking questions about these things, and a very low percentage, 15 percent, said they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood. Has there been a change since years ago in that as a new generation has come up?

ABDO: Well, I think that the statistic that people that have used is 20 percent generally—that if there were free elections today, 20 percent of Egyptians would vote for Brotherhood candidates, but I think that could be sort of an underestimation.

ABERNETHY: But so what would that mean in a government if the Muslim Brotherhood or any strongly Islamist group had influence?

ABDO: Well, there are a lot of parties in Egypt. There are a lot of political parties, as we all know. Some of them are secular, some are nationalist. The Brotherhood is only one of them. However, the Brotherhood is very well organized, and they’ve been around for a long time. They’re a social, also, organization. They run hospitals. They do a lot of sort of social work in Egypt. So they are very, very influential.

ABERNETHY: But in terms of policies, what would it mean—a policy, for instance, of Egypt toward Israel or toward the United States?

ABDO: The Brotherhood’s position today—and actually one of their leaders has been on television answering that question and he’s been reluctant to answer. He says we don’t know yet. Let’s not talk about foreign policy. But historically, the position of the movement has been against the peace agreement with Israel.

LAWTON: One of the issues I’ve been interested to watch is different representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood this week were sort of doing a Western PR campaign, and many of them said we want to have democracy but we don’t want it to look like American democracy per se, and they said they do want to see Islamic values somehow incorporated into a new government. But I think that’s what has people wondering, well, what does that mean in terms of everyday life in Egypt?

ABDO: Yes, and I think that this is something—I mean, if you can imagine, even for the Brotherhood I don’t know how they could answer this question, because they’ve never been in power. But I think that what they want—and they’ve been very clear they are for democracy, but as you say, not a Western–style democracy, and they want—whatever government the new government comes to be in Egypt they want it to reflect the values of the society.

ABERNEHTY: What does that mean, “the values of society”? Does that mean the same as strongly Islamic values?

ABDO: Well, I’ll just give you an example, okay? When the Brotherhood wrote a draft party platform three years ago, they said that they wanted a group of scholars to vet laws passed by the parliament to make sure that they conformed with Islamic values, so that’s one thing they have proposed.

ABERNETHY: For instance, relating to women?

ABDO: Relating to women, relating maybe even to, you know, what students learn in school, relating to whether women wear headscarves. They have said they won’t make veiling mandatory. They have said this.

ABERNETHY: Would an Islamist government or a government with strong influence from the Muslim Brotherhood—would it be different as far as attitudes towards the United States are concerned?

ABDO: I do think so. I think that we have to be very careful not to be alarmist at this point, but I do think that not only the Brotherhood but many Egyptians actually believe that they should be sort of not so reliant on the aid that they receive from the United States, and they want to be more in charge of their own destiny.

LAWTON: There’s been a lot of different countries that have tried to incorporate Islamic values and democracy. What are the challenges? You know, some people say, is democracy compatible with Islam? Is this a new experimental point?

ABDO: I think it really is, and if we, even though this has been written about so much this week, I think if we take the two models we know of now, right, Iran and Turkey, I think that we are looking at a future Egypt that resembles Turkey much more than it resembles Iran. And Turkey, let’s face it, I mean Turkey’s been very successful. They have a vibrant economy, and they have so far been able to walk this tightrope, and I know that that’s something—

ABERNETHY: So we would not be looking at a theocracy.

ABDO: Definitely not. I don’t think—that is definitely not coming to Egypt.

ABERNETHY: What about the other religions in Egypt—the Copts, for instance, ten million of them? What’s the outlook for them in a new kind of government?

ABDO: The Copts, as we all know from reading the papers, have been the target of a lot of violence in Egypt, and I think that we know also that some of this violence has come from the state security services and the forces. So if there is a new state presumably there will more religious tolerance, I mean, we can only hope so. Just today, for example, there was a report that the current interior minister may have been involved in the attack on a church in Alexandria.

ABERNETHY: We have to leave it there. Geneive Abdo, many thanks.

ABDO: Thank you, nice to be here.

Tweet

On July 1, President Obama signed legislation imposing new unilateral sanctions on Iran that he promised would “strik[e] at the heart of the Iranian government’s ability to fund and develop its nuclear program.”

“We’re showing the Iranian government that its actions have consequences,’’ Obama said. “And if it persists, the pressure will continue to mount, and its isolation will continue to deepen. There should be no doubt—the United States and the international community are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.’’

At the same time, Obama suggested that the United States and the international community have learned something from the morally disastrous sanctions imposed on Iraq two decades ago, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe that left the civilian population devastated, the infrastructure in tatters, and hundreds of thousands of children dead.
The new Iranian sanctions, Obama said, would be targeted or “smart’’ sanctions, aimed at the elite and those “who commit serious human rights abuses,’’ while exempting technologies “that allow the Iranian people to access information and communicate freely.’’

Obama also insisted that “the door to diplomacy remains open.’’ But there is no new diplomatic initiative in the offing, according to Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative scholar and foreign policy commentator who attended a White House briefing on the Iran sanctions this summer. Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that the White House believes the new sanctions against Iran “would at least cause the regime significant pain,” but at the same time the president acknowledged “that the regime may be so ‘ideologically’ committed to getting a bomb that no amount of pain would make a difference.”

The sanctions bill passed Congress overwhelmingly, 99-0 in the Senate and 408-8 in the House, with not a lot of debate on Capitol Hill and little discussion outside the halls of Congress. It was welcomed by the roughly 50 members of the conservative group Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, while a number of policy analysts voiced their misgivings. The unilateral US sanctions, accompanied by a similar set of unilateral measures from the European Union and Asian nations, followed a fourth round of United Nations-imposed punishments—its harshest sanctions yet against Iran—that were approved by the Security Council on June 9. Yet in early September the New York Times was reporting that, despite sanctions, Iran “has dug in its heels, refusing to provide inspectors with the information and access they need to determine whether the real purpose of Tehran’s program is to produce weapons.” So far, at least, sanctions have not forced Iran to change its direction.

The tough new measures on Iran coincide with the publication of “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions” (Harvard University Press), a comprehensive and devastating look at the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 and kept in place until the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies in what was called “the coalition of the willing.’’ The author is Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and a prominent voice for many years in debates over the ethics and morality of using economic sanctions in international public policy.

“Invisible War” is a harsh moral and practical judgment on the role the US played in imposing sanctions on Iraq, and it sounds a timely ethical warning about the future use—and misuse—of sanctions. Gordon writes:

The sanctions regime on Iraq, as it was designed, interpreted, and enforced by the United States, evinced a willingness to see appalling things done in the name of security, and this requires us to consider that measures equally damaging and indiscriminate may be pursued in other circumstances, whether in the name of stopping aggression, drug trafficking, or terrorism. We must come to grips with the perversity of this. It is simply not good enough to say that atrocities committed for the right reasons, or by respected international organizations, are not really atrocities after all.

She states the case even more strongly in a recent post on one of the blogs of the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine:

It is hard to look at the current sanctions on Gaza and Iran without recalling the Iraq sanctions regime—both the structural damage and pettiness. It seems that what the US learned from Iraq was to claim that it now employs “smart sanctions,’’ which will never do the kind of broad damage as we saw in Iraq. … As we hear that Israel will now allow potato chips and juice into Gaza, it is hard to fathom how anyone can rationalize that these ever posed a threat to Israel’s security. But above all, what we should know from Iraq is this: causing destitution in distant lands does not make the world a better place, or make the United States, or anyone else, more secure.

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, as the Cold War ended and new forms of international conflict arose, sanctions emerged as a major tool of foreign policy and international governance, and one that has been employed especially by the United States, acting either with the United Nations or with allies or unilaterally. As Gordon and others have pointed out, more than two-thirds of the 60-plus sanctions cases since 1945 were initiated by the United States, and three-quarters of those involved unilateral US actions. Writing on ethical economic sanctions 10 years ago in the Jesuit magazine America, David Cortright and George A. Lopez of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame declared, “Sanctions have become the virtual 911 of international decision makers to enforce norms of justice and international peace.”

Sanctions are attractive to policy makers—and the public—for a number of reasons. They seem more substantial than diplomatic finger-wagging, less costly to impose than military action, and morally preferable to war. “They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment, not an act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs,’’ Gordon wrote in a 1999 issue of CrossCurrents, the journal of Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Over the years, as the humanitarian consequences and punitive social impact of comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and other countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia became apparent, ethicists began debating more urgently how this tool should be understood. Albert C. Pierce, professor of ethics and national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, writing in a 1996 issue of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, argued that economic sanctions “are intended to inflict great human suffering, pain, harm, and even death and thus should be subject to the same kind of careful moral and ethical scrutiny given to the use of military force before it is chosen as a means to achieve national political objectives.’’ According to Gordon, “because sanctions are themselves a form of violence, they cannot legitimately be seen merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing international law.…They require the same level of justification as other acts of warfare.’’

Pierce, Gordon, and others say sanctions should be evaluated in much the same way and with similar principles as force is evaluated, that is, with the just war doctrine. Gordon, for example, argues the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated both the criteria that must be met before going to war, such as just cause and the probability of success, and the criteria for how the war is conducted, employing such norms as proportionality and discrimination,’ which bars directly intended attacks on noncombatants and noncombatant targets.
Comprehensive economic sanctions as employed against nations such as Iraq in 1990, Haiti in 1991, and Cuba since the 1960s, have failed to achieve their goals while at the same imposing devastating hardships on the civilian population. Gordon cites studies that found the economic sanctions leveled against Iraq were responsible for the death of some 237,000 Iraqi children under age five. At best, sanctions have been successful in just a third of the cases where they have been employed. US sanctions in Iraq “systemically overrode many of the basic principles of international humanitarian law,” she writes, adding that “many have maintained that the magnitude of the suffering was such that the sanctions regime could properly be termed genocidal.”

Some experts, however, pointing to the cases of South Africa and Yugoslavia, suggest there have been at least modest successes with the use of the sanctions tool. “Even in Iraq,’’ according to Cortright and Lopez, “where the frustrations and humanitarian agony of sanctions are most acutely evident, sanctions initially had some impact in convincing Baghdad to make concessions to UN demands.’’ They argue that sanctions can be reformed, and smart sanctions can be used to deny decision-making elites access to financial resources while trying to avoid harm to civilian populations, thus meeting moral and ethical standards.

They have also written that “some degree of civilian pain is inevitable with the application of sanctions and does not make every use of the instrument unjust. International law professor Lori Fisler Damrosch argues that, although sanctions impose hardships on vulnerable populations, they may be ethically justifiable if carried out for a higher political and moral purpose such as halting aggression or preventing repression.”

Cortright and Lopez have suggested that “the use of targeted measures, if properly enforced, could be a means of enhancing the effectiveness of sanctions while reducing their adverse humanitarian consequences.’’ They caution that “substantial improvements in international compliance will be necessary, however, for financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and travel sanctions to have the kind of targeted impact reformers seek.”

In particular, they argue that “sanctions work best as instruments of persuasion, not punishment,” and concessions by a targeted regime “should be rewarded with an easing of coercive pressure.” Even the imposition of smart sanctions “should be limited by specific ethical standards of just cause, last resort, right authority, probability of success, proportionality, and civilian immunity.’’

Applying just war criteria allows for making some distinctions. Lopez, for example, has endorsed the most recent round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, arguing they have a reasonable chance of success. He has also noted they “capture the important policy subtlety that sanctions must pressure for compliance, not punish for capitulation,’’ are smart in that they “undermine real assets and capabilities that Iran might use for weapons production,” and make sanctions “the cornerstone rather than the entire edifice of a nuclear rollback policy.”

But Lopez has been critical of the unilateral US sanctions, testifying before Congress in December the proposed unilateral step by the US “will inflict economic pain in Iran, but produce no political gain on issues important to the United States.” They would have, he said, an adverse impact on the human rights situation in Iran, strengthen the ruling regime, and would undermine “the reasonably strong coalition of support condemning Iranian actions that has emerged over the past year, and which is the ultimate leverage against Iranian misbehavior.”

Looking at past examples of where sanctions-stimulated reversals have occurred—Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, or Libya—Lopez said the lesson for the Iranian case is “we cannot punish them into a nuclear deal.’’

“Only an astute mix of narrow sanctions to focus their attention, continued engagement, and versatile incentives will provide this,” he told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, gives the current sanctions regime “good marks in terms of being well-structured in relation to the goals,’’ and she praises the Obama administration for its effort to “standardize the message about the goal of sanctions: to coerce Iran back to meaningful negotiations—not to destabilize the regime.”

Yet as she has argued in an online interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, if the sanctions are to have “any hope of bringing Iran to the table in a meaningful way, they need to be perceived by Tehran as a serious threat to regime stability. And that would involve some real stress on the Iranian economy such as major inflation, growing unemployment, unrest over economic circumstances.”
But that pushes the situation toward the ethically questionable outcome of inflicting harm on civilians rather than regime leaders and raises inevitable questions about the relation between sanctions and force. For Gordon, sanctions themselves are “a form of violence—no less than guns and bombs—and it is ethically imperative that we see it as precisely that.” For Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “If there is no will to use force to back the sanctions, then the sanctions are morally dubious.”

In March, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a member of Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, called Iran “the most dangerous regime in the world” and said “the diplomatic virtues of patience must not be used to conceal the vices of inaction and appeasement.”

The conservative leaders, who include Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Bill Donohue of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others, did not address any ethical issues but focused on the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“We are running out of time to apply diplomatic pressures to this dangerous regime, and every day we delay, every moment we fail to show resolve, that regime comes closer to threatening the region and stability of the world with nuclear weapons,’’ the group said in June.

Nor have more liberal religious organizations broached the Iran sanctions issue with ethical analysis. In its most recent statement, the World Council of Churches warned in 2007 that “threats to begin another war in the Middle East defy the lessons of both history and ethics.” The council said it was referring to “the belligerent stance of the US toward Iran and of Iranian threats against the US and Israel. The region and its people must not suffer another war, let alone one that is unlawful, immoral, and ill-conceived once again.”

The lack of particular religious and ethical response to the latest round of sanctions against Iran may be due in part to the fact that so far the sanctions are targeted rather than comprehensive, aimed Revolutionary Guard-owned businesses, Iran’s shipping industry, and the country’s commercial and financial sector.

But the US sanctions also target Iran’s energy sector. The July unilateral sanctions penalize companies for selling refined gasoline to Iran or supplying equipment in a bid to increase its refining capacity. Despite being a major oil producer, Iran imports at least a third of the refined gasoline products it needs and, if tightly enforced, sanctions could bring about widespread disruption of the Iranian economy. Some policy experts worry, however, that such secondary sanctions—targeting firms that do business with Iran—inadvertently do more harm than good.

“They are sanctions against our allies, and the people that we need to get on board with us, to help us deal with them,’’ Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said in an online interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robert Einhorn, the State Department official who oversees US sanctions against Iran and North Korea, told National Public Radio on Sept. 1 the sanctions are beginning to work—at least to put pressure on the government if not to bring it to the bargaining table.

“It’s interesting to know that Iran’s imports of gasoline have dropped very substantially in recent months,” he said, “so that is putting pressure on Iran.’’

At the moment, however, nobody is raising moral and humanitarian concerns about either sanctions imposed by the United Nations with a general international consensus or the more stringent measures imposed unilaterally by the United States and the European Union. But sanctions create an ethical conundrum. If smart sanctions do not appear to be working, if they do not have the right combination of pain and incentives to induce a regime to come to the bargaining table, if they are seen, in just war terms, as unlikely to produce success, then the temptation for policymakers is either to abandon them for another alternative, usually armed force, or to ratchet up the penalties closer to the punishing comprehensive embargo imposed to such devastating effect—Gordon calls it “gratuitous harm”—on the Iraqi people.

Either move entails the risk of violating just war principles. But a choice in one direction or the other might at least generate a more robust public conversation about the ethical justifications and moral implications of economic measures designed as an alternative to war, and more vigorous debate about the proper policy toward Iran—a debate that has yet to take place.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “Drones and the Ethics of War.”

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, guest anchor: Extraordinary scenes from Iran this week as hundreds of thousands took to the streets in protest over the disputed presidential election. Iranian officials say President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by a landslide. But supporters of the main opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi claim the election was rigged. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a quasi-theocratic government, and the protests put new pressures on the cleric-run establishment. Kim Lawton has more.

KIM LAWTON: In the week of mass demonstrations, many supporters of opposition leader Mir Huessein Moussavi did something almost unthinkable. They challenged Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

GENEIVE ABDO (Iran Analyst, The Century Foundation): It’s believed that he more or less gave — authorized — the rigging of this election.

LAWTON: Geneive Abdo is an Iran analyst at the Century Foundation. She says some of the protesters went so far as to call the Ayatollah a dictator.

Ms. ABDO: This is really, really unprecedented in Iran, where people on the streets in such great numbers are shouting against the Supreme Leader. It’s actually illegal to do that. People are imprisoned for doing that.

LAWTON: In an unusual sermon during Friday prayers, Khamenei called the election “definitive” and said there was no fraud. He urged Iranians to unite behind their Islamic government. Still, he’s ordered the Guardian Council, a body of 12 clerics and Islamic law experts, to look into the situation.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has strong support from religious conservatives.

Ms. ABDO: He is considered to be a very spiritual person, and this is also something that he capitalizes on, which is one way that he makes sure that this base of religious conservative Iranians living in the provinces continue to support him.

LAWTON: But Ahmadinejad also has religious opposition, including from some clerics.

Abdo says it would be a mistake to see this as a secular-religious dispute.

Ms. ABDO: If you watch television you’d think that society is sharply divided between secularists supporting Moussavi, religious people supporting Ahmadinejad. The reality is much more complicated than that. Those supporting Moussavi are also religious.  It’s not they don’t want clerics involved in politics, they don’t want clerics involved in their lives, it’s just certain clerics.

LAWTON: Abdo doesn’t believe the Islamic republic is in danger of toppling, but she says some structural changes may be inevitable.

LUCKY SEVERSON: It’s become the menu of daily life in Iraq — Sunnis killing Shiites in markets and mosques and holy sites, and Shiites retaliating, murdering Sunnis. The level of sectarian violence has grown dangerously close to an all-out civil war. Now there’s a view gaining a toehold in Washington that we should we have seen it coming. That’s the central message of an influential new book called THE SHIA REVIVAL by Middle East scholar Vali Nasr.

Dr. VALI NASR (Professor, Naval Postgraduate School and Author, THE SHIA REVIVAL): It goes to the very beginning. When the Prophet Muhammad died, there was a dispute over who should be his successor. The Sunnis gathered as a community and chose the most trusted, the best among them as what came to be known as a caliph; whereas the Shiites, particularly over time, would dispute that method of choosing a successor, believing that the Prophet had a spiritual charisma — he was the chosen of God — and that charisma went through his bloodline. They always looked at these imams, as they are called, as the true leaders of the community and believed that the Sunnis had erred by not following the progeny of the Prophet.

SEVERSON: Nasr, who is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, says the U.S. invasion of Iraq tipped the fragile balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites who have a history of violence dating back almost 1,400 years.

Dr. NASR: Shiites, in particular, have a history of persecution, because they were the underdogs. They lost to the Sunnis early on. Their various saints were killed, and most important of them was the Prophet’s grandson by the name of Hussein, who was killed at the battle of Karbala. And the brutal way in which he was killed essentially galvanized Shiism. In fact, Hussein’s martyrdom is much like the crucifixion of Christ.

SEVERSON: Nasr describes Shiism as very Catholic-like, recognizing some imams as saints, also as intermediaries between man and God, and he says Shiites are much more passionate about rituals, like this one called “Ashura,” which commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala.

Dr. NASR: It is a dramatic event in which large numbers of people gather. They cry, they sing eulogies for Hussein, they beat their chests, sometimes they draw blood, and they go into a frenzy. Now in Iraq it was forbidden, because Ashura has the quality of not only affirming Shia identity, which Saddam did not want to happen, but it brings large numbers of Shiites together in a state of passion frenzy. So the very first impact of American presence in Iraq — you had two million people showing up in Karbala performing something they hadn’t been allowed to for some time. That cultural freedom then translated into political power when they began to vote and identify as one community.

SEVERSON: Under Saddam, the Sunnis ruled Iraq, even though they were the minority. But throughout the world, Sunnis vastly outnumber Shiites. There are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims, and only about 15 percent are Shiites. But Shia are the majority in Iraq and the overwhelming majority in Iran, which the Ayatollah Khomeini transformed from a secular state into an Islamic one when his followers overthrew the Shah in 1979. Nasr says Khomeini claimed to be the supreme leader of all Muslims.

Dr. NASR: The more Khomeini tried to say that he is the Islamic leader, the more Saudi Arabia and their allies in the rest of the Muslim world began to say, “No, no, no, you’re a Shia.”

SEVERSON: Professor Nasr says in addition to Saudi Arabia, other Middle Eastern countries like Jordan and Egypt are worried that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has emboldened Shias not only in Iraq, but in Iran as well.

(to Dr. Nasr): How important to the future of Iraq is Iran?

Dr. NASR: Enormously at this point, because Iraq is currently extremely unstable, and the Shia community of Iraq, so long as they feel enormous amount of insecurity towards the U.S. intentions and towards coexistence with Sunnis, are likely to look at Iran as an ally, as a patron. And Iranians similarly are extremely concerned about what the outcome in Iraq will be.

SEVERSON: During the U.S. occupation the insurgency was fueled by the Sunnis’ fear of Shia domination. It was the Sunnis who dispatched suicide bombers to Shiite neighborhoods. But ironically it was the Shiites who historically deployed martyrs to attack their enemies. It was a practice Iran’s Khomeini refined after his followers deposed the Shah.

Dr. NASR: The Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini openly tried to use this veneration for martyrs, dying for the faith, in service of protecting the Islamic Republic. And Iran did so in particular during the Iran-Iraq war, where large number of Iranian youth basically used their bodies to defeat Iraqi armor because Iran did not have enough war material.

SEVERSON: It was war in Lebanon in the early 1980s that marked the beginning of the use of suicide bombers as a method of war. Hezbollah suicide bombers killed almost 600 Israeli soldiers, which eventually led to their pullout from southern Lebanon. They also bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241.

Dr. NASR: At that time, everybody thought that martyrdom is the monopoly of Shiites, that the Sunnis would never do it. But gradually Arab sort of radical Sunni groups, Palestinians as well as Al Qaeda, came to a theological shift to embrace what they had seen in Hezbollah and make it their own. We saw that they actually adopted the things the Shiites do at the very time that the Shiites stopped using it.

SEVERSON: Nasr says the Shiites’ reluctance to turn to violence in Iraq was greatly influenced by the revered Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Dr. NASR: He very early on understood that this is a historical opportunity for Shiites to assume control of Iraq, and elections, democracy, one-man/one-vote benefits them, and they should not embrace violence. They should embrace the political process. But as the Sunni violence against the Shiites escalated, as Shiites died in marketplaces and were assassinated, he began to lose authority. So, you know, the Shiites began to assassinate, torture, kill, kidnap and attack Sunnis as well. And Sistani continues to call for calm, but his voice is fainter than it was two years ago.

SEVERSON: The leader whose voice is growing louder is the young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr, not highly regarded as a religious leader, but he has a strong militia and close ties to government.

Dr. NASR: He was never a good seminary student, never finished his work, used to play a lot of video games when he was a youth. But in some ways he has surprised a lot of people, because not only has he survived, he has gained in power, and he’s proven himself to be politically savvy.

SEVERSON: Nasr says one of the most significant and unintended results of the invasion of Iraq was the empowering of neighboring Shiite Iran, whose leaders use the Shiite belief in messianism for their own political gain.

Dr. NASR: There is the expectation of a second coming of the 12th imam, and therefore the Iranian regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, and even it is doing it today under the present Ahmadinejad — uses this popular level, folk-level attachment to the myth of second coming in order to mobilize the population for various political or military activities.

SEVERSON: Military activities, Nasr says, such as the most recent war with Israel in Lebanon, a war that greatly increased the stature of the Iranian-funded Hezbollah, at the same time bolstering the influence of Iran as a major player in the Middle East — a state of affairs that causes considerable angst among Sunnis in the region who fear that Iran is building a nuclear bomb.

Dr. NASR: The lesson of Hezbollah’s showing in Lebanon is to also show that the Shiites have the ability to be a regional power. They are the ones who have the, you know, capability or courage to take on the Israelis, not the Sunnis. It doesn’t hurt this attitude in the Arab world that Iran also happens to be the most powerful country in the region right now.

SEVERSON: Nasr thinks the sectarian violence is moving toward an all-out civil war.

Dr. NASR: There is not sufficient force on the ground to forcibly separate them out and impose peace on them by force. And, you know, the scale of killing, the ways in which communities are being cleansed on both sides is all suggestive that you’re having — essentially both sides are posturing for what might be a final showdown.

SEVERSON: What is needed, he contends, more than anything is diplomacy — for the U.S. to talk to countries it now has no diplomatic ties with, namely Iran and Syria.

Dr. NASR: Now engaging Iran or Syria does not mean recognizing them. It does not mean accepting their regimes. It means, rather, that you open a door to be able to talk about some basic concerns of the U.S. It’s like the way we dealt with the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan could call the Soviet Union an evil empire and yet meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and try to push for U.S. interests.

SEVERSON: The sectarian violence in Iraq continues unabated. Not everyone in the Bush administration agrees with Professor Nasr’s views, but he was invited to meet with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and the president.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.