US planning a new regional expansion of the Sunni-Shiia confrontation with Iran

According to Glen Kessler of WaPo, Cheney got the bigger of the two government planes currently available, so journalists with the Rice junket were bumped and have had to fly commercial, hence in many cases have to fend for themselves, for instance in Germany they had to figure out how to get in from the airport. In an exciting reportage, Kessler says the group made a collective decision to get on a train that, it turned out, had already ended its run.

The coverage in the NYT reflects the new light touch too. Running with an AP story, they head it: "Rice to Confer with diplomats about Iran. This is in contrast to the fact that in Amman she met, not with diplomats, but with the intelligence-agency chiefs of four Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, so the underlying story is "Rice meets with the Mukhabarat in the Arab world and reports to diplomats in Europe". And of course the joke yesterday was that the discussions with Suleiman, Bandar and the others were aimed at creation of a government of national unity in Palestine!

I'm kidding. The Kessler story wasn't an allegory about the robots of pack journalism operating on low power. And the unprecedented meeting of Rice with the heads of the Mukhabarat, then reporting to diplomats in Europe, wasn't funny at all. First of all, there are levels of incompetence , such as here, where people become incapable of embarassment, and that explains the fact that Rice's meeting with the Mukhabarat was reported as a routine affair, even though what is supposed to happen is that a foreign minister meets with her counterparts, or with heads of state, who then formulate policy, and in each country that policy is transmitted to domestic agencies including the Mukhabarat and others, for implementation. Rice's direct meeting with the assembled Mukhabarat is a sign that the security apparatus of the Arab regimes have become an integrated part of the US administration. The point is made by Abdulbari Atwan in Al-Quds al-Arabi this morning.

Moreover, the meeting had nothing to do with Palestine, he says. Rather, it was about turning up the heat on Iran, and he devotes the rest of his column to a consideration of likely coming events with respect to this.

First of all, says Atwan, the selection of these four countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE) indicates that these will be the central supporting regimes in the event of a military strike against the Iran to wipe out its nuclear facilities, to rein in the defiance of its allies in Iraq, and maybe even to put an end to them. Washington has been the instigator and proponent of Sunni-Shia fitna in the region, but it is also true that the Iranian regime has lacked the wisdom to counteract that, by holding its Iraqi allies back from falling into the sectarian trap. But his main point is that the level of fitna is now entering an even more dangerous period:

The state of sectarian polarization has entered a more dangerous phase in recent days, because instead of being limited just to the Arab neighbors of Iraq, it is now spreading to the Islamic neighbors of Iran, because according to the latest American plan, Iran is to be surrounded by a "Sunni square or octagon", on the pretext of the danger that its nuclear ambitions pose to the region. In other words work is already well under way aimed at expanding the "Arab moderage" alliance into a "Sunni Islamic". The recent trip of Pakistani president Musharraf to a number of Islamic capitals is part of the attempt to lay the groundwork for this new alliance, and it has been decided that Islamabad will host this coming Sunday a meeting of foreign ministers of seven Islamic countries: Egypt, Saudi, Jordan, Turkey, Malasia and Indonesia [in addition to Pakistan] to study issues of interest starting with Palestine, and to prepare for a summit of the respective heads of state in Mecca thereafter.

Clearly there has not been a sudden pan-Islamic awakening to the need to help the Palestinians, Atwan says. Otherwise there would have been an invitation to Syria to attend these meetings: Syria which has sacrificed a lot for Palestine, and part of whose land is still occupied by Israel. And what about Iran: is it not an Islamic country? Why isn't it being invited? And what about the timing? If there was this urgent need to help the Palestinians, why wasn't it manifested before the US started its campaign against the Iranian nuclear program? If the idea is to help the Palestinians, what about working to break the economic blockade? In other words, this clerly has nothing to do with Palestine. It is an escalation in the American strategy for isolating and pressuring Iran, using the Sunni versus Shia theme: a theme whose catastrophic effects are already to be seen in Iraq, and which the Americans are now bent on augmenting.

When you read the papers you will see that "Rice to confer with diplomats about Iran," but if you read more widely you will see that our journalists got on the train that had already ended its run, so clearly the train they should have been on left the station a long time ago.