The past two years have put paid to the notion that the Arab world was secure in the hands of pliable tyrants, a lazy equation of autocracy with stability that ignored the many ways in which Arab despotism was almost a purpose-built assembly line for the manufacture of Islamists. Yet, at the start of year three in the messy unfolding of the Arab awakening, the region approaches four potentially seismic moments.
The Syrian revolution and pending fall of the blood-soaked Assad dynasty; the dangerous stand-off with Iran; the wrenching succession facing the House of Saud; and the imminent death of the two states solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will all test the nerves and ingenuity of policy makers. America may wish to pivot towards Asia and Europe may be turned inward, but the Middle East offers no respite to international or regional actors. It is equally unforgiving of the reckless and the feckless.
It was the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, a rash roll of the regional dice, that reignited the historic battle between Sunni and Shia Islam. Syria and, potentially, Lebanon are currently the main frontline of this corrosive contest. Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority, an esoteric offshoot of Shiism that is the backbone and nervous system of his crumbling security state, is the Shia proxy around which Iran and Hizbollah, Lebanon’s parastatal Shia Islamist movement, have grouped.