Saudi says U.S. policy handing Iraq over to Iran

Robert Gibbons, Reuters:

U.S. policy in Iraq is widening sectarian divisions to the point of effectively handing the country to Iran, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said on Tuesday.

"(Iraq's) people have been separated from each other," Faisal told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. "You talk now about Sunnis as if they were separate entity from the Shi'ite."

He urged the United States, which is battling a Sunni Arab insurgency against occupying U.S. forces and backs the Kurdish- and Shi'ite-led Iraqi government, to work "to bring these people together."

Saudi Arabia has voiced fears that an Iraqi constitution, due to be put to a referendum in four weeks, could split the country apart and disenfranchise a Sunni minority that lost power when a U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"If you allow civil war, Iraq is finished forever," Faisal said. READ MORE

Such a conflict, he said, would bring in Iran because of its interest in the Shi'ite-dominated southern part of Iraq, the Turks because of their concern about an autonomous Kurdish surfacing in the north, and Arab nations in the region.

"We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait," said Faisal, referring to the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saudi Arabia fought with U.S. and other allied forces to liberate Kuwait after Iraq invaded.

"Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason," he said.

IRANIAN INROADS

Iranians, Faisal said, go into areas that American forces have pacified and "pay money ... install their own people (and) even establish police forces and arm the militias that are there."

"And they are protected in doing all this by the British and American forces," he added.

Turning to another area of friction, Faisal pointed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "the main overriding issue that separates" the Islamic and Arabic world and the United States.

He said Palestinian security services had been weakened by Israeli military action and it was "too much" to expect they could control militant groups such as Hamas.

"Hamas is better armed than them," he said.

Israel, which has been battling a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000, has said there could be no move towards a Palestinian state until militants are disarmed.

Faisal said he disagreed with U.S. President George W. Bush's thesis that tyrannical governments in the Middle East and other Islamic regions were the source and sustenance of extremists.

The foreign minister noted that repression in the Soviet Union had not bred Russian terrorists threatening the United States.

"The real cause of terrorism (is that) people see injustice being perpetrated in this world and they use that to fire up the young to end their life," Faisal said.