Iraq Will Be Decisive to Middle East Stability, Not Iran

Beirut -- For Iran to become the dominant power in the Middle East, the United States and the region's majority Sunnis would have to disappear. That's not soon likely, so expect more tension as Iran and the U.S. go at each other.

Rather than speaking of Iranian "dominance" as a given, it's more sensible to presume that the process through which the Islamic Republic accumulates power in the region will be a contentious one. Oil calculations alone suggest the United States will not and cannot allow Iran to become too strong, nor can we forget that Iran has mainly gained because of the Bush administration's tribulations in Iraq. The relationship will remain antagonistic, regardless of the "dialogue' over Iraq and Iran's nuclear program. Iraq is where the balance of power in the Middle East will play itself out, and having filled the Iraqi vacuum it created in 2003, the U.S. is the natural counterweight to Iran, and vice versa, in the Persian Gulf.

However, the operative word here is balance: American exclusion of Iran is today a pipe dream, which is why the optimal instrument the U.S. has in its quiver is to play on the Iranian regime's weakest facet: its denial of democracy.

Iran on its own cannot impose hegemony, let alone stability, on an uneasy Sunni region. The only prospect for stability through hegemony may be where the non-Arab regional military powers--Iran, Israel, and Turkey--impose spheres of influence on their increasingly anemic Arab neighbors, with American acquiescence. But this is not going to happen soon, if ever. And with sectarianism re-emerging because of the failings of the Arab nationalist state (in Iraq and elsewhere), Iranian Shiism would be regarded as even more of a peril than it is today.

LEBANON

Michael Young is the Editorial Editor and a columnist for Lebanon’s The Daily Star newspaper