Scholar explores Iraq war

The U.S. war in Iraq has empowered Shiite Muslims in a way that may upset the sectarian balance in the Middle East for years, and it has helped neighboring Iran gain influence in the region, says Iranian studies scholar professor Vali Nasr.

Speaking Friday evening at the University of Utah for the 15th Reza Ali Khazeni Memorial Lecture in Iranian Studies, Nasr explored the origins and ramifications of the Shia-Sunni conflict in Iraq and beyond.

Shiite Muslims make up 65 percent of Iraq's population, but only 10 to 15 percent of the 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. "If the U.S. liberated anyone in Iraq, it wasn't a generic liberation, it was a liberation of Shia, who had previously been dominated by Saddam Hussein and Sunni Muslims, said Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future."

Because Shiites are now powerful in Iraq, Shiites from Iran, Pakistan, India and Lebanon now make pilgrimages to Iraq's Shiite holy cities, then return home "with a much stronger sense of identity," Nasr said. "There has been a cultural identity revival of Shia in the region."

The sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni that began nearly 1,400 years ago as a dispute over who should succeed Islamic prophet Muhammad has now become a different kind of power struggle. "They aren't fighting over religion," Nasr said, "they're fighting over real estate."

The sectarian conflict already existed before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, but it took the war to make that conflict mobilized and violent, said Nasr, who is professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The sectarian divide has now spread out of Iraq into Lebanon, where last summer there was a telling moment: No sooner had the first Hezbollah rockets landed in Israel, he said, than the Arab/Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as well as Web sites associated with al-Qaida, criticized it as a "Shia powerplay."

Some observers believe the "second sectarian front" will be in Lebanon, and that this will "be an important driver in how the region responds to the sectarian issue."

From about 2005 onward, the United States began to distance itself from the Shia authorities in Iraq, to bring the Sunni to the table, a move that the Shia saw as a betrayal, Nasr said.

After the Sunni insurgent bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in the winter of 2006, many Shia began to argue that Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani's call for restraint should be replaced with an eye-for-an-eye approach, he said.

"The U.S. ended up losing the Shia and not winning the Sunni," he said. And more radical Shiite voices have emerged.

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