Mubarak And The Clash of Civilizations

Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has triggered a firestorm in his neighborhood by saying something commonly heard in the Sunni Arab street. In an interview with Al Arabiyah TV, Mubarak said most of the Shia in the Middle East were loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they resided in.
Predictably enough, the most vigorous response came from Iraq. President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Adnan Pachachi – the three top Kurdish, Shia and Sunni leaders of the country -- issued a joint statement criticizing Mubarak for "taking a stab at Shia Iraqis’ patriotism and civilization.” Outrage poured in from quarters as diverse as the Hezbollah and Shia members of Kuwait’s parliament.
Infused by this rather unexpected bestowal of authority, Iran conceded wielding immense influence among Iraqi Shias, adding it was spiritual in nature. Coming from a theocracy, the last qualification was perhaps redundant.
In reality, President Mubarak only repeated a variation of concerns King Abdullah of Jordan and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal had voiced last year: The rise of Shias in Iraq could come at the expense of all Arab Sunnis.
Most of the Sunni regimes in region hated Saddam Hussein; they were among the first to commiserate his departure. If the containment of the Baathist regime ever continued to made sense, it was among the leaders of these Sunni regimes.
Three years after Saddam’s fall, there is no single Arab state that is even close to becoming as strong as Iran. Arab Sunni leaders also recognize that their own legacy of bickering would prevent the emergence of one anytime soon. Most Sunni Arab states, on the other hand, have sizeable Shia minorities. They could get all kinds of wrong ideas from their newly resurgent Iraqi cousins, especially with Washington and Teheran courting them.
At a philosophical level, the prospect of an American-Iranian deal on Iraq is baffling to many Arab Sunnis. Many Americans still can’t figure out how 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers turned out to be nationals of a traditional American ally like Saudi Arabia. Most Sunni Arabs will have an equally hard time understanding how Americans could be so eager to talk to Iran’s Ayatollahs on stabilizing Iraq while threatening to nuke their own suspected nuclear-weapons facilities.
Then the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards steps in to complicate matters. Last week, he called on United States to accept Teheran as the regional hegemon. Now even the most paranoid Sunni knows such a quid pro quo is far-fetched. But, then, wasn’t that the precise role successive U.S. administrations had conferred on the Shah’s regime.
Mubarak may have had another motive. Contrary to conventional wisdom in the West, Iran is not an Arab state. It resents the misconception. The one thing the ayatollahs had no problem inheriting from the Shah was the notion of the supremacy of Iran’s Persian heritage.
Could Mubarak, the leader of another cradle of civilization, have wanted to expose the clash of civilizations within the Islamic world? Not really far-fetched, eh?