The revolutions of the “Arab Spring" have combined two features: Calling for freedom and toppling tyrannical regimes on the one hand; and “liberating" civil contradictions, both confessional and ethnic, from the clutches of those same regimes, on the other. It seems that the second feature is the lofty price that the first one must inescapably pay. In this sense, one may say that Iraq beat everyone else to the “Arab Spring". Indeed, tyranny there was toppled and freedom was attained in 2003, with the ouster of Saddam's regime. But there too, the sectarian conflict erupted in 2006, yet without ever descending into the level of an all-out civil war. Here, a discussion about the U.S. role in changing Iraq does not add any value to the issue at hand beyond being pure demagogy. To be sure, if the change had instead taken place from within, this would have altered nothing in the nature of the sectarian conflict we saw – just like the change that took place without foreign intervention in the other Arab countries did not prevent the eruption of this conflict. In fact, it may even be possible to say that the previous U.S. role in Iraq had helped slow down and attenuate the conflict in question, which was the key reason there were reservations and concerns about the U.S. pullout. So where can the current Iraqi explosion, which is being renewed at an escalating pace, be located along the intersection between the “people's" freedom and the unleashing of the conflicts trapped within? As the transformation in Iraq unfolded in 2003, it swept away Sunni symbols from power and put the latter in the hands of Shiite symbols. This process was completed with the conclusion of the U.S. withdrawal, which took place in conjunction with the expansion of Iranian influence in Iraq. Thus, Iraq was taken as a belated reward merited by the “Shiite revolution", whose precursors first appeared with the regime of Hafez al-Assad, and which culminated with the Iranian revolution in 1979, with Hezbollah, since 1982, becoming one of its most prominent regional repercussions. But the fact that this reward was delayed by nearly a third of a century meant that it had to coincide with the eruption of the “Sunni revolution". Given the intertwined bonds between Syria and Iraq, the eruption of the Syrian revolution left a clear impact on the Sunnis of Iraq, who were now emboldened and encouraged to rise up against a “Shiite rule" that is unacceptable to them. Thus, the Iraqi conflict today appears explicit, clear and crude, and has less camouflage of modern ideology than all other conflicts in the countries of the “Arab Spring". For in Iraq, a spade is called spade, with much less embellishment and maneuvering. And in equal clarity, albeit in much less bloodiness, the Arab-Kurdish conflict also proceeds, where “coexistence" has been exposed for the lie that it is, in a manner that the most ideological of the two sides can no longer endorse. However, the coincidence of the reward being offered to the “Shiite revolution" and the eruption of the “Sunni revolution" throughout the region, renders Iraq a very sensitive and grave place, as it is difficult for one country to accommodate two such conflicting and earth-shattering events at once. Therefore, if the explosion that began in al-Anbar should expand, then it will surely sweep away many people and many things in its way. We must not fail to recall here that the Sunni – Shiite conflict in Iraq, which is too close for comfort to Iraqi Kurdistan in the north, and to the growing Syrian bloodletting, is not far either from the fertile and conflicting preparations being undertaken by the Iranians, the Turks and the Gulf countries simultaneously. And worse than everything else is the fact that Shiite Iraqi political leadership today is aligned to a non-Iraqi project, even when it is based on a confessional partnership with Iraq's Shiites, while the Sunni Iraqi leadership, which is fixated on restoring a bygone era, may disseminate in the sphere of the "Arab Spring" an excess amount of reactionary and backward-looking attitudes.
