I take a bigger picture view.
Worldwide there is an aggressive and occasionally violent confrontation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Americans naively do not recognize the distinction. So when Sunni terrorists (aka Saudis) attack New York we blame Shiite Iran. AS long as these two religious factions clash, Israel feels safer.
In a special 9-11
edition of the
Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:
... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate ... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.
In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by"the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt" following World War I. The victorious Europeans had"imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European"schools and scientific and cultural institutes" that" cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.
Osama bin Laden was a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed:"What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."
Juan Cole, a well-known historian of the Middle East, has pointed out on his
blog, Informed Comment, that the split between Sunni and Shiites in Iraq is of relatively recent origin:
I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 year s. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists.
The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.In 2014 Professor Cole
summed up the differences between Sunni and Shiite this way:
Shiites are more like traditional Catholics in venerating members of the holy family and attending at their shrines. Contemporary Salafi Sunni Islam is more like the militant brand of Protestantism of the late 1500s that denounced intermediaries between God and the individual and actually attacked and destroyed shrines to saints and other holy figures, where pleas for intercession were made.
By blindly backing the Saudis, POTUS has taken a side in this conflict. Looking to blame Shiite countries for the actions of Sunnis, attacking Shiite rebels fighting Sunni/Saudi backed governments, placing economic sanctions against Shiite countries while forgiving terrorists attacks by Saudi/Sunni terrorists (9/11), by refusing to sanction Saudi actions (after all they are good customers of POTUS). Going to war against Iran is a logical progression of this policy.
The Iraq war taught us one thing about the Military Industrial complex that Americans seen to ignore. War forces DOD to re-supply. and DOD doesn't order replacements; instead DOD orders high tech replacements at a much higher cost. When we drop a 'dumb' bomb; we reorder a 'smart' bomb at ten times the cost. Defense contractors have really hooked POTUS on this concept. When confronted with the fact that numbers of our military aircraft were unavailable for conflict (because of inadequate maintenance forces) POTUS orders higher cost replacments that require almost double the maintenance. How many commercial airlines would fly if they needed 52 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight time? It's not a coincidence that the Military Industrial Defense contractors provide expensive solutions that makes the situation worse. The threat of war just makes it easier for them to milk the DOD cow.