When the Shiites Rise
Article Summary and Author Biography
By toppling Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has liberated and empowered Iraq's Shiite majority and has helped launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come. This development is rattling some Sunni Arab governments, but for Washington, it could be a chance to build bridges with the region's Shiites, especially in Iran.
VALI NASR is a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, an Adjunct Senior
Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within
Islam Will Shape the Future.
Snapshot
Tehran's policies reflect only one interpretation of Shiite theology. Returning to the pre-1979 consensus among Shiite religious leaders may be the key to resolving the crisis in Iran.
IRAQ THE MODEL
The war in Iraq has profoundly changed the Middle East, although not in the ways that Washington had anticipated. When the U.S. government toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, it thought regime change would help bring democracy to Iraq and then to the rest of the region. The Bush administration thought of politics as the relationship between individuals and the state, and so it failed to recognize that people in the Middle East see politics also as the balance of power among communities. Rather than viewing the fall of Saddam as an occasion to create a liberal democracy, therefore, many Iraqis viewed it as an opportunity to redress injustices in the distribution of power among the country's major communities. By liberating and empowering Iraq's Shiite majority, the Bush administration helped launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come...
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