Andrew Sullivan's Dark Vision

Click here for Andrew Sullivan's ruminations on the big bad picture in the middle east. It seems he sees a regional conflagration as virtually inevitable. Its the long predicted Arab vs. Persian clash, and he sees it as inevitably here, with Iraq "the trigger not the cause."

We agree almost completely. Here are our exceptions:

• Andrew's inevitability is not so inevitable. Its hard to see Sunni Saudis and Egyptians getting into a shooting war with Iranian/Iraqi Shia. The regimes in charge of those two nations are totalitarian monoliths with little hope of fielding effective armies for off-territory war-fare. The regimes are too hated by their own people to make prolonged warfare likely, much less inevitable.


• Iraq is the cause, not the trigger. Think back to September 12th and the relative stability of the region at that moment versus today. If the US, given the moral authority and global support it could have wielded, had stopped at Afghanistan, put real force into the Palestinian/Israeli peace process and spearhead globally supported diplomacy to open restrictive societies, we would be in a very different place right now.