Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one historical factor affecting the war in Iran.
Iranian Shiites have a saying, “Sag Sunni.” It means Sunni Muslims are dogs. The Iranians don’t mean it as a compliment.
The framing of the recent military action in the Middle East so far has been the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Yet President Trump pointed out during a White House appearance with the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Tuesday that Iran has also attacked other countries nearby: “They’ve hit Qatar. They’ve hit U.A.E. They’ve hit Saudi Arabia. They’ve hit Oman,” Trump said. Iran also used missiles and drones to attack Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, according to a statement by those governments and the U.S. Reports on social media yesterday showed what appeared to be an Iranian drone strike near a U.S. consulate in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
What’s up with that? It goes beyond just Iranian incompetence in reaching Israeli targets or Iranian attempts to hit American military bases and diplomatic installations in the Arab countries. It—like much of what happens in the Middle East—has something to do with the split between Sunni Islam—the dominant variety and the religion of most of the regional royalty—and Shiite Islam—the religion of Iran’s ruling clerics and of its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. Iran is a Shiite country with some Sunni minorities. The Sunni-Shiite split is frequently a stronger explanatory dynamic in the Middle East than settler-colonialism or U.S. imperialism or oil or whatever other favored explanation the press or academia are pushing.
Some of these tensions are visible also in the U.S. internal reaction to the campaign against Iran, which has been more muted than the opposition to Israel’s military actions against Hamas terrorists in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Many of the U.S. mosques and activist groups are Sunni-aligned, and, perhaps as a result, they haven’t been organizing massive protests against the U.S.-Israeli strikes against the Iranian regime.
