Dire warnings about a wider regional war or a war of civilizations between the West and Islam are overblown. That would be the third World War. No Islamic state has the means to choose such an apocalyptic path.
However, long insurgency and guerrilla warfare are feasible and probable in the region that Israel inhabits and in Iraq. The cause of this bloody and destabilizing prospect is not Israel but the unresolved sectarian and ethnic conflicts among the Islamic countries of the Middle East and West Asia.
Hizbullah’s state within the state in Lebanon has suddenly brought things to a head. Israel has reacted using the only option available and that has opened Pandora’s box.
Lebanon smolders with latent sectarian and ethnic conflict. The Maronites, Sunnis, Shiites and Druze each had armed militias and warlords for decades. Most of those were dismantled when peace arrived in the 1990s but Hizbullah got special dispensation because Israel was occupying a large part of South Lebanon.
The occupation ended but Hizbullah became too strong to dismantle since the militias of other Lebanese warlords were mostly folded into the national army and were just too weak. This sectarian reckoning continues.
Of course, all Lebanese civilians want an end to the warlord culture because they have tasted democracy and prosperity. But so long as Israel can humiliate their country at will by bombing anywhere with impunity, no patriotic Lebanese can take the risk of confronting Hizbullah to dismantle it.
At the same time, none of the other Lebanese sects want to make Hizbullah stronger by helping it against Israel. Thus, Lebanon’s own political fragmentation has become the catalyst of its destruction.
In Iraq, sectarian conflicts are turning into a civil war. The conflicts are Islamic and ethnic. The Kurds are non-Arabs struggling for freedom from centuries of Arab rule. Persian Shiites are helping Arab Shiites in Iraq, reawakening centuries old Sunni-Shiite power politics in the region.
The Saudi Sunnis and the Bedouin Sunnis who rule Jordan had suppressed Shiites and propped up Sunni rule in Iraq until Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. They did that because of their hatred of Shiites, which started nearly 1400 years ago, and their visceral fear of ethnic Persians. These sectarian conflicts continue but this time the US is caught in the middle.
Meanwhile, America’s close friend Saudi Arabia is reported to be covertly helping the bloody Sunni insurgency in Iraq against the Shiites and, thus, indirectly against the US. At the same time, the Saudi’s tired of being criticized in America are diversifying their oil exports to China, India and elsewhere. Gradually and prudently, they are making themselves less vulnerable to political pressures from Washington.
Worse, neither Sunnis nor Shiites are monolithic groups anywhere in the region. In Iraq, Shiite sects are violently jockeying for power to control the country or at least its key areas. Those include the oil rich south near Basra, the Shia holy cities in the center, and sections of Baghdad, which contain the poorest Shiites of the entire region.
In Lebanon, Shiites are divided among the core supporters of Hezbollah (reported to be around 60,000) and the over 1 million other Shiites. Similar rivalries exist among Lebanon’s Sunni and Maronite communities. The Druze have always been loners and operate almost like a tribal kingdom in the mountains.
Israel’s war in Lebanon and US presence in Iraq have brought these sectarian hostilities to a boil. Peace and security for Israel are unlikely to be achieved without resolving some of these tensions, including those between the moderates and extremists of each sect. That may take a lot more bloodletting.