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Post-War Iraq Is a Pawn in Middle East's New Cold War

(National-Abu Dhabi) Mohamad Bazzi - Nearly eight months after the March 7 parliamentary elections, both Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his main rival, Iyad Allawi, the former premier whose coalition won the elections by two seats, insist that they have the right to form the next government. Washington and its Arab allies prefer Allawi as the next leader of Iraq, while Iran wants to ensure that al-Maliki or one of its other Shiite allies remains in power. More broadly, relations between Sunnis and Shiites throughout the Middle East are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis are worried about the regional ascendance of the Shiite-led regime in Iran; its nuclear program; its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership; and its meddling in other countries with large Shiite communities, especially Lebanon. The Iranian regime has gained the upper hand in the latest political maneuvering. Tehran has brought together two of its staunchest Shiite allies: al-Maliki and the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr's political ascendance threatens to stoke sectarian tensions: his followers were responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Sunnis during Iraq's recent civil war. His militia, the Mahdi Army, unleashed death squads that assassinated Sunnis and drove them out of Shiite neighborhoods. The Mahdi Army is among several Iraqi Shiite militias that received training and weapons from Iran, according to U.S. documents in the WikiLeaks archive. The writer is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University.
2010-11-05 09:50:50
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