Iran nuclear deal will not banish Middle East demons

The final deadline is almost upon us for the United States and five other powers to reach a deal with Iran to constrain its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. A deal would be not just President Barack Obama’s Nixon-to-China moment, but evidence that diplomacy is still a good weapon with which to confront global threats.

Yet, the thinking behind it was more ambitious. Mr Obama, anxious to extricate the US from the quicksands of the Middle East, nursed the idea that re-socialising Iran into the region’s geopolitics would build a self-regulating balance of power. A deal would be followed by detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran, easing the struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam — and the proxy wars each prosecutes across the region.

But the sectarian battle has intensified. Since the interim nuclear deal of November 2013, much of the Middle East has burst asunder. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), originally the Iraqi chapter of al-Qaeda created after the US-led invasion in 2003, regrouped in Syria and swarmed back into Iraq, declaring a jihadi caliphate in swaths of Sunni territory in both countries, and in effect partitioning them.

Through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran is pulling Syria’s Assad regime — which it all but controls — back to lines of defence from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast. Baghdad’s Shia government is reliant on IRGC-trained militia rather than an Iraqi army existing largely on paper and in the bank balances of politicians who stole the fortune Washington poured in to create it. Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen for three months to prevent advances by the Houthi, Shia fighters, in a contest for a failed state. The Kurds of northern Iraq and Syria, effective fighters against ISIS in their own lands, have made use of US air support to consolidate and expand their territory.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are responsible for the descent into these demonic depths of sectarian carnage, but in importantly different ways. The nuclear deal, if it is sealed, will soon look like a sideshow unless this changes.

The theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran and the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia, resting on Wahhabi fundamentalism, can appear alike. But Iran does not actively export Shia sectarianism as such, whereas the Saudis spread Wahhabi bigotry. The Iranians present themselves as a shield against Sunni jihadi extremism for the region’s minorities — all deemed infidels by Wahhabism. Yet, Iran has done a lot of damage. In its ruthless projection of state power, it seems indifferent to the sectarian break-up of other states, and boasts about its Shia axis from Baghdad to Beirut. Usually, though, it has taken advantage of a crack-up already under way — notoriously after the invasion of Iraq.

Iran is better at this game, operating through disciplined paramilitaries such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah. Riyadh has relied on petrodollars and a pipeline of jihadis into Afghanistan and Bosnia before, and Iraq and Syria now.

For change to happen, Tehran has to wrest back power from the IRGC. But the Saudis would have to take on the Wahhabi clerical establishment, which legitimises their rule. Iran probably has it easier. The IRGC is a weapon, but it is on the frontlines against Isis. Wahhabism is an idea rooted in Saudi Arabia and petro-powered throughout the Sunni world. It is also on the frontlines, most visibly in the shape of Isis, an outcrop of Wahhabism with which it competes as the most effective hammer of “polytheist” Shia heretics. THE FINANCIAL TIMES