A storm of massive proportions is brewing in the MidEast
The region is splitting apart and ready to explode out of its largely artificial boundaries along two major fault lines, ethnic and religious, writes a former senior editor of the Jerusalem Post
..............Today, the Middle East is standing on the edge of an internecine eruption that is likely to sweep away the existing order and radically alter the regional order, with far-reaching strategic implications for the West.
The region is splitting apart and ready to explode out of its largely artificial boundaries along two major fault lines, ethnic and religious. These emerged most prominently after the toppling of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003. The ethnic divide is between Sunni and Shia Muslims; the religious divide is between the Islamic extremist Wahhabi and the even-more-extremist Salafi movements. The differences are not merely ideological, they are existential. The conflicts are likely to involve the major regional players: Sunni Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey; Shia Iran, and, richest of all, pro-Salafi Qatar, where annual GDP is running at more than $100,000 per person. Jihadist movements like al-Qaeda will no doubt muscle in on the anarchy in an attempt to gain new adherents.
Just as world trade has become globalised, so too has Islamic violence. Such conflicts are unlikely to be contained within the Middle East and will quickly spread to other Islamic states in Asia (principally Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia) and Africa (primarily the Maghreb states of Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Libya, but also sub-Saharan states with significant Muslim populations, like Nigeria). Nor are they likely to involve large-scale, set-piece battles between states with armies or tanks (though these will, as in Syria, be deployed against the “rebels”). Rather, they will involve the sort of insurgency that devastated Iraq, complete with human, car and truck bombs, inter-communal, inter-ethnic and inter-tribal clashes, all resulting in significant population movements to meet the ever-insistent demands of the ethnic cleansers.
Under these strains, allegiances will fray and law-enforcement agencies – the army, police and intelligence services – will fragment. Ultimately, bureaucracies and political leaderships will disintegrate. We’ve seen the movie before. But what we have seen is a work in progress. So far, no one has witnessed the final scenes. Nobody is predicting the outcome; the only certainty is that the end-game is totally uncertain. The conflict will be protracted, uncontrollable and unresponsive to Western diplomacy, however tough or nuanced. There will be no men in white hats and black hats. Only bad guys and worse guys.
That, according to my source, is the bleak outlook for his region. But political instability in the Middle East also plays into the domestic political agenda of Europe and the West in general. For the West – indeed, for the industrialised world – the nightmare is only just beginning. Two sources of grief are likely to be high on the agenda of any insurgency.
The first is the closing of what are known in the shipping business as "chokepoints" through which energy and trade must navigate. In the Middle East, these are primarily the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal.
The second is an attack on Saudi Arabia’s riches by secessionist Shia, who form the dominant group in the eastern region of Saudi Arabia, which is home to the oilfields (the Saudi Shia can expect assistance from Shia across the border in Iraq’s matching oil-rich region)....................