The 'thirty years' war brewing in the Middle East

Andrew Sullivan has a great article in Time Magazine in which he ponders whether we are at the begining of a "Thirty Years" war in the Middle East.

Americans, by and large, are unfamiliar with much of history. Their passion is the future, not the past; and their focus is understandably on their own vast and varied continent, not on the minute details of distant foreign lands. The new chairman of the House intelligence committee cannot tell the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, and his predecessor was not much better. And I’d wager that no one in the US Congress was forced in school, as I sadly was, to study Europe’s thirty years’ war. But they’d better start, because it may be already upon them. Not in Europe this time, but in the Middle East.
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It’s now clear that the US invasion in 2003 took the last lid off the volcanic crater: Saddam Hussein. Worse, America disbanded the only trained force capable of restraining it — the Ba’athist military — and refused to provide enough US troops to maintain order. Al-Qaeda shrewdly saw the potential for chaos and tried desperately to foment a sectarian war.

In retrospect, it is amazing how restrained the Shi’ites were for so long. They had been massacred and brutalised for decades, but, under the guidance of the spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they did not seek revenge for two years, despite constant attacks from a largely Sunni insurgency. But as the US dithered, as chaos mounted, and as self-defence through sectarian militias became the only way to stay alive, the divisions deepened.

The Sunni attack on the Shi’ite Samarra mosque earlier this year was the tipping point. From then on, a civil war grew and metastasised. And the forces of cohesion collapsed. Sistani is no longer the Shi’ite saviour. The street thug Moqtada al-Sadr is. The divisions are so deep, no national army is now possible, and the logic of sectarian violence and revenge, as in 17th-century Germany, is irresistible.

The pull of external powers is also unstoppable. Shi’ite Iran has long been involved in the Shi’ite sector of Iraq, financing the militias, funding the politicians, co-opting vast areas of the country. And quiet funding for the Sunni resistance has come from Saudi Arabia and Jordan.