Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 6, 1991 TAG: 9103061143
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: JOHN RICE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: AMMAN, JORDAN LENGTH: Medium
Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north are trying to ride to power on the turmoil in war-weakened Iraq, which could inspire unrest among Shiites and Kurds in neighboring states.
"I think there's been a failure to think through some of these issues," said Philip Robins, Middle East expert at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs. Robins aimed his criticism at allied leaders who made Saddam's destruction a key, if largely unspoken, war aim.
Saddam may be on the ropes, but he still retains some military muscle. His battered army still has hundreds of thousands of troops. His security services remain feared. The ruling Baath party has loyal supporters nationwide.
Fred Halliday, a Middle East authority at the London School of Economics, said Iraq may turn out more like China, which crushed a popular revolt, than Romania, which fell to one.
But the mauling Saddam has already suffered will have an impact on his neighbors. Iran and its Arab rivals will compete to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the region's mightiest military force.
For many in the region, Robins said, "a weak, fragmented Iraq is as bad as a strong, domineering Iraq."
The Shiite Muslim uprising in southern Iraq is a potential peril to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, who are ruled by the Shiites' historic rivals, the Sunni Muslims.
Shiites figure heavily in the population of the gulf Arab states, but rule in none of them. They make up about half of Kuwait's people and predominate in Saudi Arabia's most oil-rich provinces. They do rule Iran, a non-Arab country that has bedeviled the West since Shiite fundamentalists gained control.
The gulf countries and the United States saw Iraq as a bulwark against Iran and its Islamic revolution.
Iran's attempts to export that revolution were blunted by its bloody standoff with Iraq in the 1980-88 war, when Iraq was aided by other gulf countries and the United States.
Saddam, a Sunni, has not emphasized Islam during his 22 years in power, although he tried to portray his fight against the allies as a holy cause.
Robins said Iraq's decline means "greater influence for Iran in the northern gulf, which is regarded [by Arabs] as a bad thing, regardless of who's in power in Iran, but particularly if there's a chance of their revolutionary ideology coming to the surface again."
Throughout the 1980s, Iran urged the overthrow of Saudi Arabia's Sunni Muslim government and sponsored terrorist attacks against it.
Now Iranian-sponsored Shiite radical groups are claiming leadership of the turmoil in southern Iraq on the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
To the north, the outbreak of revolt among the Kurds could trouble Turkey, the giant on NATO's southern flank, which has tried to suppress demands for autonomy among its own Kurdish population.
Kurdish and Shiite radicals have vowed to cooperate for a democratic Iraq in which they would have greater power and autonomy.
But even such a democracy, yearned for by some allied leaders, could worry other states as Kurds and Shiites push for the power long denied them by Iraq's ruling Sunni minority.
"If people have talked about the need for democracy in Iraq. . . .it's not an unlikely conclusion that Iraq might become Shiite dominated," Robins said.
And the deep natural divisions between the Kurds, Shiites and Arab Sunnis that predominate in Iraq would create a permanent threat of separatist movements that would shatter Iraq and lead to a scramble for power by its neighbors.
Allied leaders have suggested new, regional security pacts to eliminate the threat of state-against-state conflicts.
But the threats to many states in the region are internal ones.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are already being pressed for greater democracy, which would translate into greater power for Shiites and resistance from the current Sunni power structure.
A strong fundamentalist force in Iraq could also affect the political balance in key states along Israel's border: Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
Although Sunnis outnumber Shiites in all of those countries save for Lebanon, fundamentalist groups there often look to Iran's Islamic revolution for inspiration or funding.
If Saddam falls, Halliday said, the most likely alternative to a Shiite rebellion would be "a pro-Soviet coup in Baghdad" by Soviet-trained army officers.
They would see "their greatest hope of survival is in ties with the Soviet Union."
by CNB