Su-Shi Watch: Ajami on Iraq's Shiites

Fouad Ajami's commentary on the rise of the shiites is illuminating: "for to the Sunni Islamists the Shiites are heretics at odds with the forbidding strictures of the Islamists' fanatical variant of the faith." His distinction between the Saudi approach to the Shiites and that of the Jordanians, the Egyptians and the Palestinians is astute: "The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, has read the wind with accuracy; he has a Shiite minority in his domain, in the oil-bearing lands of the Eastern Province, and he seems eager to cap the Wahhabi volcano in the Najdi heartland of his kingdom. There is pragmatism in that realm, and the place lives by its own coin. In contrast, Jordan and Egypt present the odd spectacle of countries heavily invested in an anti-Shiite drive but with no Shiite citizenry in their midst. The two regimes derive a good measure of their revenues from "strategic rent" - the aid of foreign powers, the subsidies of Pax Americana to be exact. The threat of Shiism is a good, and lucrative, scarecrow for the rulers in Cairo and Amman. The promise of standing sentry in defense of the Sunni order is what these two regimes have to offer both America and the oil states."