Election Putting Neighboring Nations on Edge

With suspicion, uncertainty and dread, governments across the Middle East are waiting for Sunday’s landmark parliamentary election in Iraq. To many, the vote is a deeply worrisome exercise that could produce one of a handful of bad options.

Shiite Muslim alliances from Iraq’s majority sect are expected to win, and neighboring governments fear that the result will provoke fresh violence from Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq that dominated under Saddam Hussein. If the violence isn’t contained, a civil war could erupt, causing the nation to disintegrate along sectarian and ethnic lines and spreading instability through the region.

Then there are concerns about the elected government itself. Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- ruled by Sunni Muslims -- are wary of an Iraqi government dominated by Shiites, many with ties to Iran, the region’s other large Shiite majority nation.

Tehran, on the other hand, worries that a pro-Washington Baghdad might allow U.S. soldiers to stay indefinitely. Syria and Turkey fret that Iraq’s Kurds may press for independence, stirring up separatist sentiments among their own Kurdish populations.

Even if the election succeeds in producing a representative Iraqi government, that may be the most threatening outcome of all -- a direct, democratic challenge to the region, where kings, dictators and clerics traditionally rely on fear and force to hold onto power.

“If it’s a successful election, then everybody will be scared of it,” said Ali Shukri, a retired Jordanian general and longtime advisor to the late King Hussein. “If everybody tries to take the Iraqi model, there will be upheaval in the region.”

But a continuing, low-grade insurgency in Iraq, analysts say, could actually benefit many rulers in the region. Such a scenario would keep the U.S. government too busy to pressure other governments in the neighborhood, but stop short of a civil war that could spill across Iraq’s borders.

“It’s not like Germany’s neighbors ... in 1949 [who said,] ‘My God, Germany had a democratic election, so there’s a future,’ ” said a senior Baghdad-based Western diplomat. “Iraq’s neighbors aren’t like that. They don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

A lot depends on how the new Iraqi government -- likely to be led by Shiites, who make up at least 60% of the population -- behaves.

If the new powers in Baghdad try to exclude Sunni Arabs and Kurds from the government, that probably would inflame public sentiment in the neighboring Sunni-majority states, such as Syria, not to mention Egypt and others.

That popular anger probably would be directed not only against Iraqi Shiites, but also against the Sunnis’ own governments, which many view as co-conspirators in the U.S.-led invasion.

The governments are afraid that terrorism will surge, both from Iraqi Sunnis angry over the loss of their status and from their own, homegrown militants. Even Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990, recently has suffered clashes between Islamist gunmen and security forces -- violence that many blame on the government’s cooperation with Washington.

“This targeting was the result of Kuwait’s exaggerated alliance with the American forces during the invasion of Iraq,” wrote the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Quds al Arabi after a recent gun battle. “The curse of Iraq has begun to affect all the states that conspired to strike at this country and helped occupy it, humiliate its people, destroy its national unity.”

Jordan’s King Abdullah II provoked a small scandal recently when he warned that the elections might create a “crescent” of Shiite power -- a contiguous Shiite-controlled territory through Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. (Syria’s President Bashar Assad is an Alawite, a Shiite sub-sect. And Shiites are the largest of Lebanon’s sects.)

Though Abdullah said that his remark had been blown out of proportion, what he said publicly, many of Iraq’s neighbors were muttering in private. There is a deep-seated fear of the new power balance, leading Abdullah and other Sunni leaders to issue communiques urging Iraqi Sunnis -- some of whom have called for a boycott -- to participate in the vote.

Iraq’s interim law has some built-in measures to limit control by any one ethnic or sectarian group. For instance, any new constitution must be ratified by 16 of the country’s 18 provinces, a measure expected to help balance power among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But there is little doubt that Shiites will play the leading roles in government.

Shiites -- who split from Sunnis centuries ago over the question of who should succeed the prophet Muhammad -- have historically been disliked by Sunnis. And since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which the secular shah was overthrown in a movement led by clerics, many Middle Eastern nations have viewed the Shiite government in Tehran as a danger to their own stability.

The prospect of a second Shiite-led country presents serious domestic problems for such states as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, which have Shiite minorities, and Bahrain, where Shiites are the majority but have scant political power under a Sunni government.

The Saudi regime already has been rattled by a string of bombing attacks, assassinations of foreigners and hostage-takings, and the Iraqi elections promise to drive yet another wedge between the government and its people.

The dominance of the Saudi royal family is intimately intertwined with the Wahhabi sect, which views Shiites as heretics. A Shiite administration in Iraq would leave the Saudi monarchy -- an ally of Washington’s -- in the uncomfortable position of helping install a government sure to be abhorred by many Saudis.

Iraq’s neighbors also fear that the new government will evolve into an Iranian-style Shiite theocracy, under the sway of Tehran.

Since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government, elements of the Iranian regime have funded Iraqi political parties and candidates, apparently armed some Shiite militias and provided social services such as health clinics and parks to boost Iran’s popularity, say Western diplomats who have served in Iraq’s southern Shiite heartland.

“They talk about noninterference, but all indications are that their influence is expanding in Iraq,” said Wamid Nadmi, an international relations specialist at Baghdad University.

Whether Iranian influence will endure past the elections is anybody’s guess. Religious bonds would make Iran a natural political ally for an infant Iraqi state, and Iraqi Shiites might be willing to continue receiving money and services from their Iranian patrons.

But though Iran and Iraq are linked by blood, tribes and worship, they are also rivals, deeply divided by ancient tensions between Persians and Arabs, and still traumatized by the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War that killed more than a million people.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, is an Iranian native who speaks Arabic with a Persian accent -- but he rejects Iran’s political system of installing clerics as supreme leaders. He chose to stay in the Iraqi city of Najaf under Hussein’s Baath Party rule rather than live in Iran under the ayatollahs.

Iran has repeatedly declared its commitment to a peaceful Iraq, but hard-liners appear to be banking on continued turmoil next door to stave off the pressure over Tehran’s hotly disputed nuclear program. As long as the United States is busy in Iraq, the thinking goes, there’s little likelihood of U.S. soldiers being sent into Iran.

U.S. and Iraqi officials are well aware that some neighboring governments reap a degree of protection from chaos in Iraq; officials in Baghdad and Washington have accused Iran and Syria of fueling the insurgency.

“They want to keep Iraq bogged down with an insurgency, violence and other troubles,” said Iraqi Foreign Ministry undersecretary Labeed Abbawi. “We’re trying to convince our neighbors that combating violence, terrorism and helping Iraq will, in the end, help them as well. For if this violence goes on, it won’t be contained in Iraq, but will spread.”

Both nations vehemently deny such charges. Syria has stepped up patrols in an effort to stanch the cross-border flow of insurgents. But with an estimated 500,000 Iraqi expatriates in Syria, the government says it is impossible to monitor all Iraqi activity in the country.

“We would never help to destabilize Iraq. Stability in Iraq is important to Syria and to the region,” Syrian Information Minister Mehdi Dakhlallah said. “We want to preserve the unity of Iraq and for Iraq to reach complete sovereignty.”

The call for a sovereign Iraq -- free of foreign troops -- has been heard repeatedly from its neighbors, but many leaders concede that they’re afraid of more violence if U.S. soldiers pull out. These conflicting impulses are part of the general confusion and anger over the situation in Iraq.

Nobody knows whether Iraq’s new government will pursue a cooperative relationship with the U.S., or turn against it. And for many of Iraq’s neighbors, it’s unclear which scenario would be more threatening.

“They see the potential for an independent state in Iraq that’s pro-Western,” a Western diplomat in Damascus, Syria’s capital, said. “And they don’t know what that means for them. The world they knew is shattered.”

Yet another matter of concern among neighboring nations is whether Iraqi Kurds will push for independence.

For governments with troubled histories with Kurdish populations -- primarily Turkey, but also Syria and Iran -- an independent Kurdish state is a threatening prospect. Not only could it fire the spirits of repressed Kurds to stand up to authorities in Ankara, Damascus and Tehran, it could also lead to an attempt to unite the Kurdish regions of adjoining nations into the new state.

That fear is particularly grave for Turkey, which has threatened to intervene militarily in Iraq if the Kurds take control of the oil-rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Turkey, home to an estimated 14 million Kurds, would interpret Kurdish control of Kirkuk as the first step toward secession.

For those in Iraq’s interim government who are struggling to carve out space in a tough neighborhood for their nascent democracy, the problems sometimes seem overwhelming. Foreign Ministry official Abbawi recalled how he and others in Baghdad had hoped for the support of Iraq’s neighbors after Hussein’s fall.

After all, he noted, the interim government distanced itself from the belligerent policies of Hussein, who had invaded both Iran and Kuwait.

“We would have hoped that a country emerging with the expressed interest of being a good neighbor ... would be supported,” Abbawi said. “But unfortunately, neighbors have taken a very negative stance from the beginning. Even countries like Iran and Syria that were enemies of the former regime for many years and suffered from it, even they have stood against us.”

*

Stack reported from Damascus and Marshall from Baghdad.