[NYTr] As Mideast realigns, US leans Sunni

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Steven L. Robinson (activ-l)

[Gone is the rhetoric of democracy. For good reason, the US Arab allies
in the region are all manifestly undemocratic. They are either
monarchies in name - Saudi Arabia, Jordan or the Gulf States - or in
practice, Egypt - with no toleration for dissent, even at the elite
level. SR]

The Christian Science Monitor - October 9, 2007
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1009/p01s01-usfp.html

As Mideast realigns, US leans Sunni

The White House is reembracing Sunni authoritarian regimes 
to counter the rise of Shiite Iran.

By Howard LaFranchi

Washington- Americans are hearing much less from the Bush administration
about democracy for the Middle East than they did a year ago. As Shiite
Iran rises, the White House has muted its calls for reform in the
region as it redirects policy to reembrace Sunni Arab allies - who run,
to varying degrees, authoritarian regimes.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 shifted the balance of power in the Middle
East, delivering a Shiite-led government to a country that had for
decades been dominated by its minority Sunnis. That, in turn, opened
the door to Iranian expansion.

To contain Tehran, Washington is now reaching out to Saudi Arabia, other
Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan, in the form of large arms deals and new
talks on such issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in the
eyes of most Arabs and many others remains the greatest source of
tension - and extremist support - in the region.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice travels again to the region next
week, underscoring the administration's drive for progress on Middle
East peace.

Also, a significant US shift toward Iraq is under way. American policy
is moving from bolstering the government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki as a way to force action on political issues to a "bottom-up"
approach. This has led to the funding and arming of Sunni tribes and
communities in Anbar Province that until recently targeted US forces.

"If you look at it in the context of this Sunni-Shia sectarian divide
and the fault line that divides the region, we are in effect adjusting
our position," says Martin Indyk, a former US diplomat now at the
Brookings Institution in Washington, referring to the broader
implications of the new American path in Iraq.

Having paved the way for Iraq's Shiites to take power, he says, "We find
ourselves in a situation where that plays to Iran's advantage and to the
disadvantage of our erstwhile Sunni Arab allies in the Arab world."

The result of this belated realization, Mr. Indyk says, is that "we are
adjusting ourselves to the point where we line up with the Sunnis
against the Shias in this broader sectarian divide."

Some experts in the region suggest the reaffirming of ties to America's
traditional Arab allies is not so much a sectarian question as more
simply a reemphasis on longtime US security interests in the region.

The Bush administration has concluded that those interests - energy
security, counterterrorism, and stability - are best served by working
with the Arab regimes that happen to be Sunni, they say, but not
because of some Sunni-over-Shiite shift.

"It's more Arab-Persian than it is Sunni-Shia," says Jon Alterman,
director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, highlighting the effort to
contain Persian Iran that underpins interests. "It's not sectarian," he
adds, "it's realpolitik."

Others agree that the US adjustment has more to do with a retreat from
grand goals in the face of Iran's rise, than with changing sides in a
sectarian divide.

"We have Condoleezza Rice backing off from supporting democratic reform
in the region, and the more messianic goals of the first Bush
administration have been abandoned, but that's because they don't
work," says Michael Hudson, a specialist in international relations at
the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in
Washington.

"When you talk to diplomats from places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan,
it's not Shiites, it's Iran and the power vacuum it's filling that
worries them, and that's what the US is tapping into," he says.

That said, Arab leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah, have raised
concerns about the rise of a "Shiite arc" in the region as a
Shiite-dominated government friendly to Iran took the reins in Baghdad.
And Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah warned Vice President Dick Cheney
during a visit last year that his country could enter the Iraqi
conflict on the side of Iraqi Sunnis if the US left Iraq and abandoned
them.

It is in that context that some experts like Brookings's Indyk see at
least part of the US motivation for arming some of the same Sunni
tribesmen, in places like Anbar, whose doors US troops were kicking
down not so long ago.

"We find ourselves regionally in a situation which is somewhat similar
to what we are doing in Anbar Province," he says. "We are lining up the
Sunnis to better take on the Iranians."

But another explanation for that support has more to do with turning
Iraq's Sunnis against Al Qaeda-associated forces in Iraq - which are
also Sunni, others note.

"I would call what we are doing in Anbar more of a tactic than a
strategy, and it is not something we are doing because they are Sunnis,
but because they are tribesmen - and tribesmen who are against other
Sunnis who are called Al Qaeda," says Mr. Hudson.

CSIS's Mr. Alterman says Saudi Arabia is "using sectarian proxies to
fight a national war in Iraq," but he says it does not follow that the
US is working with Anbar's Sunnis out of sectarian motivations.

"We're not doing that for them, we're doing it for us" in pursuit of our
fight with Islamist extremists, he says.

Some in the US government are using the "progress" the US has made in
Anbar to argue specifically for creation of a Sunni-dominated region
within a united Iraq.

In a statement last month following the appearance of Gen. David
Petraeus before Congress, US Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas called on
the US to promote the development of a Sunni region to help Sunnis move
forward with a greater reliance on local, rather than national,
institutions.

"We should not wait for national reconciliation to take advantage of the
bottom-up political progress in Anbar and create a Sunni region that
would play an integral role in a united Iraq," said Senator Brownback,
who is a Republican candidate for president.

Brownback joined Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware, who is also a
candidate for president, in cowriting an "Iraq Federalism Amendment"
that passed with overwhelming Senate support (75 to 23) on Sept. 26.

The amendment calls for the US to press Iraqis to employ the federalism
enshrined in their own constitution and divide the country into
sectarian regions. The bill specifically calls on the administration to
convene a conference for Iraqis to reach a comprehensive political
settlement - widely recognized as the key to ending Iraq's strife -
based on federalism.

Senator Biden unveiled last year his plan for Iraq to be divided into
three autonomous regions - Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd - under a federal
government. After the Senate endorsed that plan last month, both the
Maliki government and the US Embassy in Baghdad criticized it as an
imposition on Iraq's sovereignty and a recipe for Iraq's partition.

Biden counters that the plan is a realistic response to political
conditions on the ground in Iraq "and in fact the only hope for keeping
Iraq together."