The Arab World: a War of Sectarian Petro-Money to Delegitimize Electoral Democracy……….
“A prominent Sunni preacher in west Baghdad, Zakariah al-Tamimi, who as a member of Mr Allawi’s party stood unsuccessfully in the election, says Iran “is waging a war to colonise Iraq…America destroyed Iraq and handed it to Iran.” Behind such dastardly plans there is, he says, an American-Iranian-Israeli plot. He smilingly quotes a Hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that warns against an “impostor from the west who will be followed by 70,000 Jews from [the Persian city of] Isfahan.” A recent spate of bombs in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, presumed by independent observers to be the work of Sunni insurgents, some of them linked to al-Qaeda, had “obviously been planted by Iran.” Such theories may be dismissed as ludicrous, but they are widely believed. Suspicions among Iraq’s diminished Sunnis of an Iranian plot to do them down are no less strongly held by influential Arabs in the Gulf. They often point out that Mr Sadr, the most powerful of Iraqi Shia populists, is still living in Iran’s holy city of Qom. The Iraqi Shias’ ageing but still pre-eminent grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, is—it is widely noted by Sunnis—of Persian origin, and speaks Arabic with a Persian accent. As for Mr Maliki, he is “pure Persian, completely Persian,” insists the editor of a leading Gulf newspaper……..”
All this mentioned in the Economist article above is not just part of a regional sectarian reaction to the change to majority rule in Iraq. It is also part of a vast campaign to delegitimize the idea of electoral governance in the Arab world, to drown it with petro-money and sectarian hatred and division. This type of rubbish, like calling al-Maliki “pure Persian, completely Persian,” is the stuff of the daily rags published all over the oligarchies of the Persian Gulf. Columnists: Saudis, Lebanese, and other Gulfies rain a daily barrage of hatred and sectarian baiting in their newspapers against Iraqi Shi’a (and occasionally thinly-veiled against Shi’as in general). Iraqi politicians, with the exception of Iyad Allawi, are routinely called either Iranian fifth columnists or outright moles for Iran. It is all part of a campaign to delegitimize the majority of Iraqis. Mouthpieces of unelected hereditary absolute tribal oligarchies trying to delegitimize an elected government, not a perfect government but an ELECTED one.
Cheers
mhg
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