Mideast bypassing West in peace quest

Their current maneuvers, talking with disaffected former Baathists in their capitals and, regional diplomats say, quietly passing money to Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq in an effort to build up influence and intelligence aren't particularly likely to end Iraq's war soon.

But they could find a way to contain the violence there and the regional animosities it is threatening to inflame or set the stage for Iraq to become a proxy battle ground.

"If you're looking forward, this is the next stage," says Toby Dodge, a political scientist and expert on Mideast Politics at Queen Mary College at the University of London. "The point will soon come when it's much more obvious than it is today that the Americans are going home, and then what will the Saudis and others do?

"Will they say, right, the sky is falling in ... but we have an opportunity to contain it by working together? Or, will this become the front line of a much nastier covert war?" he says.

Greg Gause, a political science professor at the University of Vermont and Middle East expert, says: "This is about balance of power politics ... it seems to me what the Saudis, particularly the Saudis, fear is growing Iranian power, and they fear that the Iranians will seek to use that to destabilize the gulf and their own country, through their own Shia populations."

Regional diplomats say Saudi Arabia is already funding some Sunni groups in the country, and a recent International Crisis Group report on Iraq recommended that Saudi Arabia cut "off funding from private Saudi sources" to insurgent groups in Iraq that refuse work toward a national peace deal.

Iran, for its part, is in fact expanding its influence inside that country. "They want to be the guiding foreign-policy actor in Iraq, which will eventually have an oil policy, and that's also something Iran wants a say in. ... I think they're winning all this and they're ambitious," says Gause.

Dodge says that Saudi and Jordanian fears about expanding Iranian influence, famously termed by Jordan's Abdullah as a potential "Shiite crescent" arcing from Iran to Lebanon, exaggerates the threat to their states, but the fear itself is nevertheless real and could have negative consequences.

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Contributing: Correspondents Nicholas Blanford in Beirut and Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv.