LAWRENCE WAS RIGHT

The Ayatollah: Iraq's archduke?: The killing of an Iraqi Shia leader could be the event that ignites the country's tensions and causes a regional conflagration (Brian Whitaker, September 1, 2003, The Guardian)

Iraq as a country was stitched together after the first world war, from three incompatible provinces of the old Ottoman Empire: the Arab and Persian Shia of the south and south-east, the Sunni Arabs in the middle and south-west, and the Kurds (who are also Sunnis) in the north.

Although the Sunni Arabs were the smallest of the three groups, Britain decided they should be dominant and installed a king from Saudi Arabia to rule the new country. This arrangement was more for the benefit of Britain's relations with Gulf rulers than for the Iraqis themselves; the difficulty of holding Iraq together was one reason why it ended up with such a brutal dictator as Saddam Hussein.

The underlying religious and ethnic tensions were kept at bay through decades of minority rule. Saddam Hussein suppressed them with utter ruthlessness but also, as the Americans are now learning, with considerable skill.

Fear of opening up a can of worms in Iraq was one of the main reasons why George Bush Sr held back from invading in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait. Now, though, his son has lifted the lid off.

In the days of Saddam, Ayatollah Hakim's death might simply have gone down as one more in a long line of Shia martyrs, but circumstances have changed and he is unlikely to be forgotten so easily. After many years of oppression, the Shia of Iraq now have an opportunity to assert themselves - and his death provides the rationale.

A weekly bulletin issued by security consultants Kroll Associates last Thursday - the day before the assassination - carried the prescient heading: "Spectre of ethnic and inter-religious violence looming".

Besides highlighting a failed attempt to kill Ayatollah Hakim's uncle in Najaf, the report looked at the worsening situation in northern Iraq, where clashes erupted between Kurds and Turkoman tribesmen, leaving at least 12 people dead.

There was a danger, it said, that this could expand to encompass the Arab minority who were transplanted to the region by Saddam to dilute the Kurdish population.

"Tensions have been brewing between all three communities over control of the north, especially Kirkuk," it continued. "The Kurds' rush to redressing years of repression at the hands of the old regime has ignited major tensions."

It might not be quite so bad if these internal conflicts were a self-contained Iraqi matter, but they are not: they affect almost all of Iraq's neighbours.

The stateless Kurds, for example, are spread across four countries. Apart from the five million in Iraq, about 15 million live in Turkey, six million in Iran and up to 1.5 million in Syria - and Kurdish assertiveness in Iraq worries all of these nations.

Turkey is also concerned to protect the two million Turkomans of Iraq from the Kurds. The Turkomans, as their name suggests, speak Turkish and have an affinity with Ankara. If they are seriously threatened Turkey could feel obliged to intervene.

To the south, meanwhile, the predominantly Sunni countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states - worry about Shia assertiveness in Iraq. There are already some signs of Saudi attempts to bolster Iraq's Sunnis against the Shia.

Iran, on the other hand, has a natural affinity with Iraq's Shia and supports them to some extent. Its support, however, is limited because it does not want the Shia to become dominant in Iraq, for fear it would undermine Iran's own status as the centre of the Shia world.

The danger here is not just that Iraq will plunge into civil war but that the warring elements will find sponsorship from neighbouring countries, with all the attendant risks of a region-wide conflict.

When your policy in the region has been disastrously mistaken for eighty years, don't you have to expect that when the bill comes due things are going to be a bit ugly? And the bill always comes... Posted by Orrin Judd at September 1, 2003 9:36 AM