A few hours separated two events last week: The Arab League picked Ahmed Aboul-Gheit as new secretary-general and its foreign ministers labelled Hezbollah of Lebanon a terrorist organization.
There is nothing untoward about Aboul-Gheit’s appointment as he is a veteran diplomat and politician. What is new is that he will find himself forced to deal with a different Arab scene where there is no room for niceties. We may have reached “the era of getting off the fence” and forgetting about running away from challenges through empty talks.
Since the “Arab Spring,” the comfort zone and room for maneuvers have shrunk drastically, and pressing internal and external issues are impossible to temporarily adjourn or permanently ignore.
Many Arab entities, within its 2011 borders, were running away from providing convincing answers to questions about their legitimacy, borders, popular representation and social cohesion. In fact, if some claim that the occupation of Iraq in 2003 was the incendiary device that ignited the Sunni–Shi’i conflict, others may point out that the seeds of this conflict were sown in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran decided to export his so-called Islamic revolution.
The policy of exporting the “Islamic revolution” in its unadulterated sectarian form was bound to encounter a reaction based on a logical argument, that is self defense. Indeed, the Khomeini onslaught, with its Persian hard-core content, ‘Islamist’ and ‘revolutionary’ coating, and painted by the slogans of “Liberation of Palestine” and “Death to America & Israel” were soon confronted theologically, nationalistically, politically and militarily.
The Iran–Iraq conflict was a costly war in what we see today as an existential war between an Arab world that has understood Islam in an open and uncomplicated ‘generic’ format and an extreme nationalist and theocratic Iranian regime whose philosophy and discourse have been based on a melange of complexes including haughtiness, vengefulness and insistence on correcting of the wrongs of history and geography.
From the outset, the Khomeini project rejected coexistence and sought hegemony. And if Khomeini considered — in his own words — that he “drank the cup of poison” by agreeing to the cease-fire with Iraq, his project of hegemony has not died. It has not for two main reasons. The first and foremost was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Second, Iran’s success in absorbing the shock of the aborted war, and its re-launch of its penetrative offensive in a smart, silent and more diligent manner.
Actually, one example of how Iran managed to learn from its past mistakes was its refusal to be dragged into the Afghanistan quagmire when Washington was on the side of Taliban who were then viciously fighting the Shi’i Hazara. It also turned a blind eye in 1998 and let pass the murders of a number of Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan.
Since then, the post-Khomeini Iran, led by self-proclaimed ‘reformers’ and ‘moderates’, knew how to benefit from the ever increasing Arab frustration, and mushrooming of Sunni extremists spreading from Indonesia (Bali attack) in the East, to the US outrage (Sept. 11) in the West. In such a climate, the political attitudes of several ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ western politicians matured to bring about the current positions of the ‘Democrat’ Barack Obama, ‘traditional Left-wing Labour’ Jeremy Corbyn and ‘ex-Communist’ Federica Mogherini, all of whom firmly believe that dialogue is possible — indeed, necessary — with ‘political Shi’ism’ but never with ‘Political Sunnism’.
Today, the Arab world is paying a heavy price because it is the closest Muslim neighbor to Christian Europe, it has a large Muslim population worldwide and because Sunnis make up around 75 percent of its population.

SOURCE:

http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/900461