The neighbors are getting nervous. The end game is near. Everybody wants to be in the right position. Over the weekend King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia summoned Vice President Dick Cheney to Riyadh for a brief two-hour meeting - the flight was over ten hours over and thirteen hours back with headwinds. This Wednesday Bush is flying to Jordan to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Jordan's King Abdullah Al Hussein. Time was, Third World leaders would fly to Washington. Not anymore. This time Cheney did the flying.
And he begged the Saudis for help in getting the Sunni minority under control in Iraq. The oil-rich Saudis have considerable influence over the Sunnis. And they are definitely worried about a Shiite dominated Gulf. In the past, King Abdullah (the Saudi one) lobbied Bush and Cheney on a plan to establish a contingent of Arab and Muslim troops in Iraq. The Iraqi government accepted the plan, but Bush recoiled because the UN would have controlled the special force. The Saudis agreed to place their forces under the command of the Iraqi government, but the US continued to insist on ultimate control, which doomed the suggestion. Bush, in a weakened position, may now be somewhat amenable. Presently none of the 160,000 coalition troops in Iraq are from religious Muslim countries. King Abdullah of Jordan will tell Bush that there are three civil wars going on and that something has to be done now, not in 2007, before all hell breaks loose. Bush will tell Maliki that he better crack down on the Shiite militias run by al-Sadr. In the meantime, Arab League chief Amr Musa convened a special meeting of Arab foreign ministers on December 5th in Cairo to come up with a plan to prevent the disintegration of Iraq. The Arabs are seeking to internationalize the mediation effort and US withdrawal, which will not succeed without the approval of the neighboring countries, Syria, the Arab League, Turkey and Iran. Bottom line: The Sunni Arab states, including Syria, have to put pressure on the Sunni insurgents. And the Iranians have to pressure the Shiites. But the Baker Hamilton report - a holy grail of sorts - will come out pretty strongly that we should talk to Syria and Iran. Bush says its not going to work, so why try.
All of the neighbors now believe that if Iraq disintegrates into ethnic chaos, the bloodshed will come spilling back on them. Iran is fearful that instability among the Iraqi Shia Arabs will spread to the Iranian Shia Arabs, and eventually come to threaten the current Persian rulers, who are barely a majority. Syria is worried that Islamic fundamentalism will threaten their secular regime. Syria, Turkey and Iran are worried that Kurdish autonomy will enflame their Kurdish minorities. Nobody in the region really wants the breakup of Iran and they are worried that US policies are leading to this result. So they want to step in. Iranian President Ahmadinejad, for what its worth, said Sunday that he was willing to help calm Iraq if Washington changes its "bullying" policy. "You have been trapped in a quagmire...with nowhere to go." "The Iranian nation is ready to help you get out of that quagmire." Meanwhile, over the weekend the chief of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, reminded religious leaders of their pledge to prohibit the shedding of Muslim blood (US blood is apparently OK to shed). He urged all Iraqis, "to fear God in their faith...to refrain from committing these prohibited grave sins," according to Agence France Presse. He issued his appeal as the architect of the Mecca Document, signed and endorsed by senior religious authorities in Iraq, both Shiite and Sunni, who vowed to God in front of the blessed Kaaba (holy stone in Mecca) not to violate the sanctity of Muslim blood. If the foreign Muslim troops - from Jordan, , Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan -- were to be interjected, under the control of the Iraqi government, it might just be an elegant, but risky, gamble and the "least bad" option that the Middle East, or the US, has left.
jfleetwood@aol.com