Iran or Saudi Arabia: Pick Your Poison
America will soon have to choose between the Shiites and Sunnis as the Islamic civil war rumbles on, writes Youssef M. Ibrahim. It all boils down to which side has the better chance of adapting to modernity.
What’s your poison: Saudi Arabia or Iran?
That is a choice the next U.S. president must make. In strategic gist the West too is at a point where its myriad of religious-political establishments must decide what wings of Islam, those sponsored by the Saudis or the Iranians, are adept for coexistence.
That a choice has to be made is clear from the savage wars between Shiites and Sunnis and those tearing at Sunni Muslim societies as well as nipping at the heels of Islamic democracies from Turkey to Pakistan and even the Muslim communities of Europe and America. That, too, is a war between Iran and Saudis over corpses of others.
A thorny choice indeed — akin to asking “what’s your poison?” But it is a realpolitik choice of the kind Henry Kissinger mastered so well in the grand war on Communism. Whichever way we cut it, life with weaponized Islam is here. While both Saudi Arabia and Iran fan its flames, only Iran can douse that fire.
Ever since its historic revolution of 1978-1979, Iran has emerged as an invigorating force behind ascending Shiism. But it has also reached emotionally and deeply into the much larger community of Sunnis that forms a majority of the 1.2 billion Muslims.
Why? The ayatollahs refashioned a crumbling revolutionary world of leftist-socialist Arab radicalism into an attractive pseudo-Islamic package. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the revolution, and the vast, sophisticated clergy of Iran assembled the zest of Che Guevara, Mao, the European left, and Arab nationalism, all neatly wrapped into a chador-enclosed religiosity. The model is pragmatically revolutionary rather than theologically fanatic. It is in fact a tool to renegotiate Iran’s geopolitical repositioning rather than a heavenly quest.
That it is appealing is undeniable.
Arabs and Muslims have joined in the transporting élan, including great masses of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinians, and enthusiasts among Muslim lands as far as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Chechnya.
Faced with this existential as well as cultural and religious challenge, Saudi Arabia responded by digging up its ossified version of Sunni Islam, the very antithesis of change.
Since 1979 it applied its oil money assiduously to export that version of militancy to the world’s Muslim communities as the antidote — Osama bin Laden being its most famous product. Iran of course gave us the ayatollahs’ American diplomatic hostages and assorted mayhem. The difference is control. Iran has it over its crowds. Saudi Arabia lost it.
In many ways the two models are dinosaurs. But in their behemoth battle they trampled the delicate tissue of secular Islam — what pundits refer to as moderate Islam — which dominated large Islamic nations. In those places militancy has now eclipsed moderate culture. In Egypt a Saudi Wahhabi veil totally envelops that country, which once led the Arab world.
Beneath that process, Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism is eminently negotiable. It rests on 5,000 years of civilization, which broadens its parameters. It is layered on top of Persian empires, a wealth of culture, literature, poetry, art, and a vastly sophisticated population, where women work and drive.
Tehran is clearly pleased that Iraq’s 15 million Shiites dominate their government and that Lebanon’s one million Shiites and their Hezbollah militia have proven themselves. It celebrates Shiites in Bahrain and several million more in pockets from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, along with wealthy merchant communities all over the Persian Gulf region. But it is not intoxicated by it and considers them tools of the trade. You can dialog with that.
By contrast, what exists in Saudi Arabia is a culture and religious model with no options other than the inflexible vision we have come to know as Islamofascism. It rests on a nomadic desert-raiding culture combined with literal application of 7th-century Koranic text, designed to avert challenge and insure submission. What you see is what you get overseas. Both regimes are exporting aggression, but while Iran yearns for modernity, Saudi Arabia is threatened by it.
It reflects the greater divide between Shiism and Sunnism parting at the very concept of ijtihad, roughly translated as “intellectual initiative.” Shiism encourages debate and questioning. The rewards for Shiite clerics who thrive at ijtihad are an increase in followers and financial donations. The Saudi royals and theologians view the very idea of debate as apostasy, just as they see Shiism itself. Shiites only want everyone else to see the light.
If, as is the case, we are fated to deal with weaponized Islam, Iran’s version and its levers of control over it are the better choice.
American presidential contenders fuming over whether to talk or not to talk with the mullahs should ponder this reality.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal is a freelance writer and Mideast political risk consultant based in New York.
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14 Comments
1. DoktorNo:OK, point taken. It is a bit of USA-China reapproachement in 1970’s, aren’t it? China has been good and sound counterweight for USSR and its allies like India or Vietnam.
But I have doubts, if it’s possible now, when current messianistic hardliners are in power in Teheran.
Feb 6, 2008 - 2:07 am 2. venividivici:Since you mention Kissenger, let me be the first to quote him by saying it’s a shame they both can’t lose. I say, contain them and let them fight it out, while protecting our Israeli allies and getting our oil from other places. Hopefully, if there is a God, the last Sunni and the last Shiite will end up killing each other simultaneously.
Feb 6, 2008 - 4:16 am 3. Tom Grey:I say, give Iraqi Generals, both Sunni & Shia, more cruise missiles, and encourage them to file legal lawsuits against both regimes for promoting and exporting terrorism.
At some near term, Iraqi Generals/ politicians will be calling for Iraq to unify against the terror murderers of, first Iran, then Saudi Arabia.
The US, in training the Iraqi Military, is training the Army that will Liberate Iran — and collect the blood money which justice says is owed it by the Iranians. And then the Saudis.
Feb 6, 2008 - 5:16 am 4. Dr.Shalit:Seems to me that that was Kissenger’s Plan to begin with, a strong “Iran”, i.e. a modern Persia, as a counterweight to the Sunni/Arab Powers. This idea was wiped out by the events of 1979. Whether the “Grand Design” can be put back together under the current regime in Teheran is problematical – and there lies the rub. -S-
Feb 6, 2008 - 5:29 am 5. Ethan:What we need to do is rather than support Iran’s government, we need to support the great lions of Persia – the people of Iran.
They have been yoked for 1400 years under the repressive autocracy of Islam. They yearn for escape from it, to join the modern world, to seek real justice and the brotherhood of mankind.
These true Persians will be the death knell of Islam. We must support their struggle for our civilization’s future.
Feb 6, 2008 - 5:29 am 6. Chip:‘We’ve’ (the US govt has) been on the side of the Sunnis for a while. What’s strange is nobody talking about it. So I mention it in passing once in a while.
Feb 6, 2008 - 7:20 am 7. tanstaafl:I look at the two most vociferous and visible Shi’ite leaders today…Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad and Hassan Nasrallah…I listen to their their Jew hating vitriol and each one’s efforts to control, suppress and regulate respective populations…
…and the word “modernity” hardly comes to mind.
Feb 6, 2008 - 7:46 am 8. harry:I don’t know why the world just doesn’t swallow them whole. Throughout history army after army marched through most of their territory taking as they saw fit. Now that they actually have something worth taking the world finds itself kissing their asses instead! We feed these monsters with oil money while they manufacture terrorists and hatred for all.
Feb 6, 2008 - 8:09 am 9. JohnnyT:Who do you pick, HAMAS or Al Qaeda? What a choice! ike having to choose between the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. Which sect ISN’T drenched in the blood of innocents?
I say glass ‘em all and let Allah sort ‘em out. See how fast the world advances after THAT!
Feb 6, 2008 - 8:54 am 10. Morton Doodslag:More flim flam from another apologist of Islam. We are not presented with a truthful analysis, even though the author appears to acknowledge the nastiness of the two major threads of Islam — he presents them as new innovations, reactive to the nationalistic and communistic threads which briefly ran through the Islamic world in the early to mid 20th century. This analysis is simply more obscurantism designed to muddle and confuse.
To wit:
“Ever since its historic revolution of 1978-1979, Iran has emerged as an invigorating force behind ascending Shiism. But it has also reached emotionally and deeply into the much larger community of Sunnis that forms a majority of the 1.2 billion Muslims.”
This is an oft repeated and erroneous meme. The resurgence of Shia Islam in Iran and the ascendancy of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia are not a retooling of Arab nationalism, or responses to communism and socialism — they are the direct effect of trillions of petrodollars flowing into Muslim coffers which began in the 1960s and 1970s. The dabbling within the Islamic world with various revolutionary strands such as fascist nationalism (Arab Nazism), socialism, and communism were simply very brief respites in Islam’s long carreer of eternal Jihad. Once dollars flowed again into the withered desert of Islam, a world which had nearly turned to dust after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, it was inevitable that Islam would rear its ugly head and wage jihad again.
This erroneous theme is repeated again here: “The ayatollahs refashioned a crumbling revolutionary world of leftist-socialist Arab radicalism into an attractive pseudo-Islamic package. “ (*Can the author kindly remind us again about what was “attractive” about this “pseudo-Islamic package”? Can the author kindly remind us again about what is “pseudo” about the Iranian “Islamic package”? It is the truest manifestation of Shiite Islam the world has seen in centuries. The Saudi flavor of Islam is the truest form of their strand of Islam the world has seen in centuries. There’s nothing whatsoever “pseudo” about either…)
And again:
“The model [Iran's Shiite Islam] is pragmatically revolutionary rather than theologically fanatic. It is in fact a tool to renegotiate Iran’s geopolitical repositioning rather than a heavenly quest.”
Then why the complete immersion in traditional and fundamental Islamic theology and rhetoric? Why the constant exhortations to Allah, and to the life of Islam’s heinous “prophet”? Why the adherence to the most vicious forms of Sharia implementation? Iran and Saudi Arabia aren’t “revolutionary” movements hiding behind the veneer of Islam. This is Islam unmasked — Islam revealed.
While the fascistic and nazi-like strands of Islam certainly bear resemblances to these various hideous manifestations of communism or nationalist totalitarian fascism, (Nazism), it is only a comparison or resemblance that is borne. Islam is a religious ideological incarnation or form of these usually secular forms of terroristic tyranny. It is therefore actually far far worse than either. While the world (including the Islamic world) dabbled with secular forms of communism and various strains of supremacist Nazism in the 20th Century, Islam alone has maintained a 1400 year record of this kind of tyranny. Jihad is a permanent and intrinsic part of Islam, as is the Sharia law underpinning Islam. There’s no way to divorce them from each other.
Youssef M. Ibrahim’s proscription for the West is to aid the “eminently negotiable” Mullahs to defeat the implacable Saudis.
They are both nightmares which need destroying. Using them against each other is a great idea, but not to enable one to dominate the other. The strands of Islam must be allowed to wage their Jihad against each other while doing everything in our power to isolate and contain Muslims away from the West. We do not have a dog in this fight, but should aid whoever is the underdog to encourage more damage and more siphoning off of resources which otherwise might be used to wage Jihad against us.
Feb 6, 2008 - 9:45 am 11. Morton Doodslag:PS — It also strikes me as odious that the author proposes in his title that the West must take the poison of Islam in any manner. We are not required to “pick our poison” from the two strands of Islam. If anyone should be poisoned by Islam it is the Muslims and only the Muslims of the world that deserve it. To inflict this choice upon us, and to do so in order to only offer us the choice of aiding one form of fascist Islamic tyranny to dominate another equally disgusting form of Islamic fascist tyranny is among the most cynical and loathsome propositions I have heard recently.
Take your Islam and choke on it, Youssef M. Ibrahim. YOU imbibe the poison of your poisonous religion,. Leave the wonderful West alone.
Feb 6, 2008 - 9:52 am 12. Observer:What the author is missing is that at least 20% of Iranians are Sunnis. The entire Baloch, Kurds, Turkmen and 1/3 of indigenous Ahwazi-Arabs are Sunni and vehemently anti-mullahs and its Shiism. Additionally, at least 1/3 of total Turkish Azeri-population- although Shia- despises Persian rulers for oppressing them culturally, linguistically and otherwise. The 5 million Ahwazi ethnic Arabs, whose ancestral lands contain 90% of Iran’s oil, hate the Parisian mullahs with passion. Other ethnic groups, such as Taleshi, Qashgais, Lors in addition to Christians, Jews, Bahis, Zoroastrians, Assyrians, Armenians, Mandanis, Sufis and others can’t wait to join the fight to overthrow the fascist mullahs. So there you have it- with Persians (assuming they all support the regime!!??) only ¬º of the population, what stability and control are you talking about? Oh by the way sir- Iran has been the historical homeland of non-Persian Madians (Today Kurds), Elimite (today’s Ahwazi-Arabs), Hittites , Byzantines and other indigenous civilizations before the Persian immigrants moved south some 2500 years ago, just to add a tad more historical animosity for the rulers. Is this enough hatred for the Persian Mullah-regime by its own population??
Feb 6, 2008 - 10:23 am 13. Billy Bunter:Arsenic… cyanide… whats the difference? The end result is the same. Why can’t we just hate ‘em all and nuke ‘em all? If that’s not a popular choice then can we get them back to the stage where they just kill each other? Those were the good ol’ days. We outta whisper in the ear of each team that we’re going to go with the ’stronger’ of the two, and let ‘em duke it out.
Feb 6, 2008 - 10:18 pm 14. Patrick Cohan:Just me venting … like anyone from congress would read this. They don’t even read their own e-mails.
PLEASE CONGRESS, get our people out of that region and focus more on our own nation! Keep our military strong, but keep them here! We are an extremely powerful nation, but we don’t need to keep flexing our muscles throughout the world. Our “interests” lie here, on our own soil: Our citizens are our “interests”. _____________________ You are worried about oil? Quit forcing us to use it! As for the amount of oil that we use/need, take it from our own soil. You know that we are sitting on enough oil to last us another 500 years at the current rate of consumption. The philosophy of draining OPEC’s supply so that we are the major supplier of the world is irresponsible … ecologically, financially, and morally. _____________________ Sad as it may seem, I am getting to the point that I could care less what is happening in other nations. If they proclaim to be our friend or ally, great! If not, tough! “Don’t Tread On Me” should be our motto again. Tell you what, why not start flying the 1st Navy Jack on our ships again as a reminder to those who question our courage or fierce desire for Independence. _____________________ There is no reason that any of our soldiers need to shed another drop of blood on foreign soil for reasons of “financial stability” or “significant cultural differences”. If their people truly get tired of oppression, they will do something about it. We did! Remember?!
Feb 7, 2008 - 10:41 am