Luttwak: The Iraq war has indeed transformed the Middle East

In today's WSJ, Edwark Luttwak from CSIS makes the case that the U.S. doesn't need to make Iraq into successful democracy in order to get the regional transformation we want, exploiting the ancient hostilities between Shiite and Sunni will work just as well.

It is this ancient animosity, he argues, that drove the anti-American head of Iraq's ruling Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to come to Washington in December, to seek U.S. protection for Iraq's Shiites against their Sunni compatriots.

And it is the threat of this ascending "Shiite crescent," that is drawing the region's Sunnis closer to Washington as well. Even though the U.S. may be blamed for unleashing this new Shiite power, the Sunni states recognize that the United States is still their most important protector as both share a common enemy in this fight - namely, Iran.

Where this new regional dynamic can be seen playing out, Luttwak says, is in Lebanon. There the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are backing the Sunni-led regime against the seditious Shiite faction, Hezbollah, which has the backing of Iran and Syria. If only Syria would recognize that it is on the wrong side, Luttwak argues, this would be the tipping point in a positive regional transformation.

Luttwak even seems optimistic that Syria will in fact eventually pull away from Iran, cognizant of the fact that by remaining so closing aligned to Tehran, it has to share its pariah status. With Saddam now no longer a threat to the Assad regime, Syria would have more to gain - for example in aid and economic investment - by drawing closer to its Arab neighbors. Not to mention that this is the only path that will enable it to get out from under U.S. sanctions.

As Luttwak sums up the situation, "The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally. But the result is exactly the same."