Continuation of disruption to Iraq underscores how readily observers in the West underestimate factionalism, in its various dimensions, as a force in the Middle East.
The mistake can have dire consequences.
After coalition forces deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, for example, the US government assumed blossoming democracy would mollify Shia bitterness over longstanding oppression by a Sunni dictator and unite the nation.
Disastrously, events disproved the assumption.
More recently, the US government seems not to have anticipated a crackdown against Sunnis by the government of Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki following the departure of American military forces.
Potent as it is as a shaper of events in Iraq and all of Islam, Shia-Sunni rivalry is hardly the only form of Middle Eastern factionalism.
Both major Muslim sects have religious subdivisions, some of them contentious. Ethnicity—Arabic, Kurdish, Persian—complicates religious divisions. And Jihadism slashes jaggedly across all categories, often with internal conflicts of its own.
The Sunni-Shia schism nevertheless provides a useful framework for observing events.
It helps, for example, to explain how much more difficulty Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had moving into predominantly Shia areas around Baghdad than they earlier encountered in more-Sunni areas to the north.
And it should temper whatever enthusiasm may exist for American military support of the Maliki government, which would alarm Sunni allies of the US around the Persian Gulf.
Those worries already have been elevated by the growing presence in southern Iraq of combatants from officially Shia, hegemonic Iran.
The most encouraging recent news from Iraq has been of calls from both inside and outside the country for the ouster of Maliki, who has proven incapable of governing with requisite pluralism.
Even more encouraging would be a sign that some unifying sense of national purpose had begun to transcend factional strife.
But that might be a quaintly Western hope. Especially in a region with country borders drawn in secret by outsiders, nationalism takes work.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted June 20, 2014; author’s e-mail: [email protected])