America's unlikely savior

Sunnis increasingly view all Shiites as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shiites are the majority or that Shiites had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis are the primary victims of American military aggression, and they view Shiites as collaborators with the occupation.

And Sunni antagonism towards Shiites has been fed by an increasingly violent series of targeted killings of insurgent leaders. In the fall, Sunni leaders accused SCIRI's Badr militia of infiltrating the Ministry of Interior and sending out uniformed death squads to assassinate former Baathists and Sunni clerics. (In fact, Muqtada's militia, the Mahdi army, also sends out death squads to assassinate Sunnis it deems deserving of death, but this fact is not widely known.) The existence of secret prisons revealed that the SCIRI-dominated Ministry of Interior had learned well from America's prisons in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

For their part, Shiites tend to view Sunnis as Baathists or Wahhabis, but until last year -- despite suffering an endless onslaught of terror attacks meant to provoke a civil war -- they showed restraint. But last year the situation grew more ominous. Politics became increasingly sectarian -- and bloody. Tit-for-tat killings began: After a Shiite cleric was assassinated, a Sunni cleric would turn up dead the following morning. Threats and bombings drove Shiites from Sunni neighborhoods.

The Sunni-Shiite discord unleashed by the U.S. invasion is not confined to Iraq. Muqtada's trip to Saudi Arabia took place against a backdrop of rising sectarian tensions throughout the region. Sunnis make up the majority in every Arab state except Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon; in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in particular, they feel threatened by the Shiite renaissance in Iraq. In December 2004, Jordan's King Abdullah warned of a "Shiite crescent" from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq's Shiites have demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who cross into Iraq and commit atrocities against Shiite civilians.

These tensions have spilled over into acrimony between Iraqi and Saudi officials. In September, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. In response Bayan Jabr, Iraq's interior minister -- and the former commander of the Badr Corps, SCIRI's militia -- called the Saudi foreign minister a "Bedouin riding a camel" and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship.

In Saudi Arabia, home of Wahabi Islam, Shiites are known as "rafida," which means "rejectionists." A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shiites are outside Islam, and to Shiites it is the equivalent of being called "nigger." This is the same word that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, uses to describe Shiites, as do Sunni radicals in the region. The ascension of King Abdullah, who has taken a more moderate stance on the Shiites, is a positive development. But Saudi Arabia's 2 million Shiites have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shiite "rafida" collaborators.

In this context, Muqtada's trip to Saudi Arabia was at least a small step in building a regional bridge between Sunnis and Shiites.

As Iraqis try to form a government, it is not yet clear whether Muqtada will succeed in persuading his fellow Shiites to compromise on key issues like federalism and the constitution. Iraq's Shiites are triumphant, knowing that Iraq is now theirs and cannot be taken away from them except by the Americans. There is no threat of Sunnis retaking the country, because they had never taken it before; they had been given it -- first by the Ottomans and then by the British. SCIRI sees no need for compromise. It plans to forcefully impose a new order on Iraq, one that directly clashes with Sunni aspirations and reinforces all their fears.

The one figure opposing SCIRI's maximalist demands is Muqtada. Should he win out over SCIRI in a battle for influence, we might see a majority in the Assembly calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq, and we would also see support for a stricter imposition of Islamic law as well as increased tension with the Kurds. The Americans who had once called for his arrest or death would be forced to deal with their former enemy, though he too would now be restrained by his own political participation.

It is a priceless irony that Muqtada Sadr -- the poorly educated, inarticulate, thuggish and violently anti-American young cleric -- may be the one man who can allow America to get out of Iraq without the roof caving in after them.

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