It is clear today that America cannot take comfort in an imagined future for the Middle East, and cannot force the realization of that future. Such an approach guided the path to war in Iraq and has proven to be unworkable. The lesson of Iraq is that trying to force a future of its liking will hasten the advent of those outcomes that the United States most wishes to avoid. Through occupation of Iraq, America has actually made the case for radical Islam--that ours is a war on Islam--encouraging anti-Americanism and fueling extremism and terrorism.
The reality that will shape the future of the Middle East is not the debates over democracy or globalization that the Iraq war was supposed to have jump-started but the conflicts between Shias and Sunnis that it precipitated. In time we will come to see this as a central legacy of the Iraq war.The task before America is now to take stock of the reality of the region after Iraq and to build its relations with the Middle East with that reality in mind. The first fact that confronts the United States is that the most salient threat from extremist interpretations of Islam now wears Sunni garb. It is Sunni militancy--al-Qaeda, Wahhabi and Salafi activists, and the network of Muslim Brotherhood organizations throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe--that poses the greatest threat to U.S. interests. Religious and political ideology among Sunnis in the Middle East, unlike among Shias, is moving in the wrong direction, toward militancy and violence. If the Shias are emerging from their dark years of ideological posturing, revolution, and extremism, the Sunnis seem to be entering theirs, or at least passing into a darker phase.
A grassroots outpouring of sympathy for the victims of September 11 occurred on the streets in only two places in the Muslim world, both within days of the collapse of the twin towers, and both among the Shia. The first was in Iran, where tens of thousands snubbed their government to go into the streets of Tehran and hold a candlelight vigil in solidarity with victims of the attacks. The second was in Karachi, where a local party that is closely associated with the city's Shia broke with the public mood in Pakistan to gather thousands to denounce terrorism. What followed September 11 in Afghanistan and Iraq has only strengthened these feelings. The Shia in Afghanistan, between 20 and 25 percent of the population, were brutalized by the Taliban. The constitution adopted in that country in 2003 has broken with tradition to allow a Shia to become president and to recognize Shia law. The Shia have come out from the margins to join the government and take their place in public life. The violent face of Sunni militancy in Iraq underscores the divergent paths that Sunni and Shia politics are taking.
The Shia revival constitutes the most powerful resistance and challenge to Sunni extremism and jihadi activism within the region. Shia revival is an anti-Wahhbi and anti-extremist force. Its objectives are served by change in the regional balance of power and democracy. In turn, democracy will unleash the full extend of the Shia challenge to Sunni extremism. Democracy will bring to power Shia majorities and give greater voice to Shia minorities, whose ideology and politics diverge from the extremist bent of Sunni radicalism.
The war in Iraq may take many directions. The country may split up or hold together; it may sink into civil war, or its competing communities may hammer out a power-sharing formula to make it work. Stability will require compromise among Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds, but it will still place Sunnis at the bottom of a power structure that they once ruled. This will not douse the flames of Sunni extremism that Iraq has stoked across the Middle East. The United States cannot decide what direction sectarian conflict will take. It will instead have to prepare for the unintended consequences of the Iraq war. A second explosion of Islamic extremism will come out of the Iraqi insurgency, whose force and tenacity will be entwined with the Shia-Sunni power balance across the Middle East, and which will seek to use sectarian conflicts to expand the scope of its jihad across the region.
