What is happening is that the radical Muslim world is making progress toward healing the splits between Sunni and Shia, and Arabs and Persians. Al Qaeda was hit hard after 9/11. Iran laid back while that was happening, waiting for Al Qaeda to be weakened enough so that Iran, the largest funder of terror organizations in the world, could seize leadership of the Jihad. Much like Coumbian drug cartels count on the DEA to take care of eliminating their rivals. Al Qaeda is Sunni. Iran is Shia. Saudi Arabia, the Minister of Education of the Jihad and funder of Al Qaeda, is Sunni. Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, is Shia. Mukti Al Sadr, with his Hezbollah-lite militia in Iraq, is Shia. Hezbollah is Shia. Hamas is Sunni.
Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s guru, has started saying that he has come to heal the thousand year old Sunni-Shia split. Ahmadinejad believes in the coming of the twelfth imam, but has harbored and helped Al Qaeda, and is quite willing to join forces as long as Iran is the master. Osama Bin Laden’s son has been sent, by Iran, where he has been residing, to Lebanon to help Hezbollah. Alliances are being formed. All of these wars and maneuvers are market research, including the tentative civil war in Iraq. What will the response be if I do a little bit of this, or that? What does this tell me about the will and capabilities of the enemy, which in the Jihad’s case is everyone in the world who does not surrender to Allah in the proscribed manner?
The big challenge on the Jihadist side is to bridge the gap between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Persian, and present a unified, WMD-equipped force to the infidels, including a Stalin-Hitler pact with North Korea. Our challenge is the same, to unite the civilized nation-states to be of one mind, more or less, in this war. Where are Churchill, FDR, and Eisenhower when we need them? So far, they are doing a much better job of it than we are. However, I am fairly confident that the civilized, democratic, crisis-driven nations, while slow to respond, will eventually realize the danger and come together. When that happens, the Jihadists will have been suckered into a draw play, and will be very surprised at the ferocity of the response, much as Hezbollah has been taken aback by the Israeli response in Lebanon.
As these alliances form and the market research is done, one perhaps unintended side effect is that the issues are clarified for everyone. The Hamas and Hezbollah actions are not just market research for Iran or Al Qaeda. We also benefit from the results. We learn as much about them as they learn about us, and exactly who is zooming who becomes more and more obvious. For all the MSM sympathy for the Lebanese civilian hostages of Hezbollah, regrettably killed by Israel, certain facts have moved toward the exalted rank of conventional wisdom, e.g., Iran, and its subservient ally Syria, are behind the Hezbollah attacks, and are their necessary and sufficient supporters. This was a fringe opinion a few weeks ago. Now to deny it, is to relegate oneself to Dante’s circle of the unserious. It has also begun to take root in the zeitgeist that the nature of the war in Iraq has changed, that the insurgency has yielded to “sectarian violence”. This is vastly important and is part and parcel of what is happening in Lebanon. Al Sadr has pledged to send troops to Lebanon in support of Hezbollah. Howard Dean has castigated Maliki for being insufficiently pro-Israel.
World War III, or IV, depending on how you count, is beginning. Would that it were not so. If I were a betting man, I would bet on civilization, but there were a lot of smart Romans who lost that bet.