Price of shifting sands of Arab politics

The assassination of an Iraqi member of parliament on February 13, 2015, created an immediate reaction by the Sunni members of the parliament who suspended their participation in all debates since they considered it a sectarian crime, committed by Shiite militias against a prominent tribal head of the Janabi Sunni tribe of Anbar province.

Sheikh Qassem Janabi was very much against the sectarian, Shiite-Sunni, war, which killed thousands during the 2006-2009 period. 

His murder comes at a time when a blueprint for a new Iraq is being created.

It is in this context that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hizbollah, announced in Beirut on January 30, 2015, that his party’s new goal is to fight in Iraq, appealing to his followers to join his fighters already in Baghdad.

From a Jordanian perspective, it is not comforting to see the upheavals in our region, and more than 5,000 Iranian and Hizbollah fighters stationed in Daraa, an hour’s drive from the Jordanian border at Ramtha.

It is not comforting either, to spoil collective efforts to defeat Daesh in Mosul through a coalition of Sunni and Shiite fighters, by having suddenly a sectarian civil war flare up at the worst possible timing in Iraq.

Hizbollah may have become overconfident and lost the advantage of sober, erudite strategic planning following the great achievements in Yemen, where Shiite Houthis had the capital Sanaa under their command, and managed to occupy positions that might threaten oil navigation in and out of the Arab Gulf.

The London-based Arabic daily Al Hayat said this week that Hizbollah succeeded in interceding between the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp, General Qassem Suleimani, and Hamas leader, Khaled Mishaal, a reconciliation that would re-establish Iranian political and logistic influence in Gaza.

It is no longer a secret that Hamas has had logistic and financial support from Tehran for several years, but had to stop due to ideological differences regarding the 2011 civil war in Syria.

Tehran, boasting with its declared position against any peace formula with Israel, considering all signatories to Oslo accords or the peace treaties as non-Muslims, got the new role of aborting and sabotaging any hope to reach a peaceful solution to the Palestinian question.

But with Iranian hegemony over the decision-making process in Beirut, Baghdad, Yemen, Damascus and Gaza, the anti-peace camp in Israel found a God-sent gift.

The new generations of Arabs and Muslims in this region will pay the exorbitant price for the shifting sands of Arab politics.