Over the weekend in an interview with Breitbart, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made the headline-grabbing statement that President Barack Obama’s trust in Iran, showcased by his administration’s Iran deal, “is marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” He followed it by vowing to stand with Israel to prevent the “terrorists” in Iran from achieving their goal of another Holocaust.
The blowback from those comments was fast and sharp. Speaking from Ethiopia, Obama called Huckabee’s position “ridiculous if it weren’t so sad.” Hillary Clinton denounced the Holocaust comparison, calling his statements “over the line” and asking “every person of good faith and concern about the necessity to keep our political dialogue on the facts and within suitable boundaries.” Even fellow Republican Jeb Bush came out in opposition, calling his language “just wrong. This is not the way we’re going to win elections.”
But Huckabee’s comments and most debate about the Iran nuclear deal and U.S. foreign policy fails to uncover a flawed understanding of the Middle East. Most of the U.S. narrative boils down to “us versus them” — “us” being the United States and Israel and the West in general and “them” being a vaguely defined brand of Islamic radicalism determined to destroy Israel and Western values of democracy and freedom.
Vali Nasr
Dean, Johns Hopkins Univ. International Studies
From Washington, it looks like a moderates-versus-extremists or stability-versus-terrorism issue, but closer inspection reveals a complex picture of a Middle East divided along sectarian lines. This is where the negative reaction to the Iran deal and the general narrative about the region separates from the situation on the ground.
Much of the conflict raging in the region involves an internal battle in Islam, pitting Sunnis against Shias.
“You really don’t have a secular definition of citizenship but rather people identify as sectarian communities, and power is divided accordingly,” says Vali Nasr, a former senior foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration.
Iraq offers an example of how this plays out and why it’s important to understand the motives behind groups rising up against each other. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the belief was that Iraqis were united in their desire for democracy. However, democracy in Iraq was not advantageous to the Sunnis, in power under Saddam Hussein despite their fewer numbers. Democracy meant they would lose power to the majority Shias. So Iraq ended up in a sectarian civil war instead of the pursuit of democracy.
U.S. policy in the region is operating in the context of conflict between the two major sects in the region — Shia and Sunni — for control and influence.
If the U.S. wants to achieve its strategic goals in the region, it must understand why the conflicts are happening, even if they aren’t about the West, to better draft a policy response, advises Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he has written extensively about the Sunni-Shia divide.
He offers the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq (ISIL) and the Levant as an example, with U.S. and Iran joining forces because ISIL is a strongly anti-Shia, anti-Iran group that emerged as a powerful force in the Sunni-dominated regions of Syria and Iraq and threatened both U.S. and Iranian interests. He said that if Washington doesn’t understand what drives ISIL, the U.S. cannot effectively defeat the group.
While the theological divide between Shias and Sunnis has existed for more than a millennium, today’s fight is all about politics — who is the top dog, who gets the power, who gets the oil revenue.
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