Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

Amidst the turmoil in the Arab world, Iraq has largely been ignored by the Western media. Not so by the media in Saudi Arabia. Writing in the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat on 27 April, Editor-in-Chief Tariq Homeid described the Iraqi regime as “worse and more dangerous than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.

The problem, argues Homeid, is that while the Saddam Hussein regime was dictatorial, the current Iraqi regime “is based on a detestable sectarianism and its export”. For Homeid, the Iraqi regime’s attitude towards events in Bahrain (where it has supported the Shia protesters) and Syria (where it opposes the Sunni demonstrators) have shown that it is working for “the establishment of Shiite rule”.

The Saudi-backed paper goes further and points out that voices can be heard in Iraq saying that if the Sunnis come to power in Syria it would be because of backing from Saudi Arabia – and “this makes it clear that the new Iraqis are playing the same role that Iran is playing in its attempt to target Saudi Arabia”.

The Saudi position is that the opposition in Syria is home grown and entirely legitimate while that in Bahrain is being stirred up by Iran and by Iran’s allies in Iraq and Lebanon.

The Iraqi pro-Shia media, naturally take the opposite view. Also writing on 27 April, Abdelwahid Nasser al-Bahrani railed against Saudi Arabia on the Iraqi website www.sotaliraq.com. He wrote: “Iraq is among the countries that have suffered most from the salafist thought that Saudi Arabia has embraced. It is Iraq’s right as a state and as a nation to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for every drop of blood that was and will be spilt because of schemes woven on Saudi territories and in the corridors of its intelligence apparatuses...It is not Saudi Arabia’s right or that of its media to accuse Iraq of sectarianism. After all, Iraq never sent terrorists to blow up civilians there. It has never severed the heads of innocent shepherds for sectarian reasons.”

The central allegation against Saudi Arabia is that it has tried to undermine the demands for reform by portraying them as sectarian revolutions and then presenting itself as the defender of the Sunni interest. There is enough truth in this to make life uncomfortable for Riyadh, but there is more than a touch of hypocrisy in the complaints.

During the height of the insurrection in Iraq, Syria and Iran worked a Machiavellian strategy of Syria covertly supporting (Sunni) al-Qaeda to make attacks on Iraqi Shias, which in turn pushed them towards Iran. Now Iran is happily supporting Sunni Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and it would happily support a secular regime in Egypt provided it was anti-US and anti-Israel.

For Iran and Syria, the key division is the Israeli question and relations with the US, not that between Sunni and Shia. During World War II, when deciding which of the resistance movements to support in Yugoslavia, Churchill asked only one question: “Who kills more Germans?” As a consequence the UK sided with the more-effective communist Partisans led by Tito rather than the ideologically safer royalist Chetniks led by Mihailovic. So it is with Tehran in the Arab Middle East; it’s only concern is: “Who is more anti-Israel?”

Non-Arab Shia Iran has only two means of exercising influence in the Middle East. The first is indeed through support for the Shia. The second, though, is by leading the rejectionist front against Israel. As the Sunni Arab street is more anti-Israel (and anti-US) than its leaders, the Arab Spring is playing into Tehran’s hands to the acute discomfort, most particularly, of the regime in Saudi Arabia which suffers a treble disability. It is anti-Shia (which opens it up to Iranian-Iraqi-Syrian machinations), it is pro-US (which makes it unpopular with Arab public opinion), and it is authoritarian (and therefore cannot rely on unlimited and uncritical Western support).