Donald Trump’s bizarre decision to throw the prestige of his office behind one side in the great sectarian divide that runs through Islam in the Middle East has already sparked brush fires across the region — and the fallout can only get worse.

At the beginning of his visit to Saudi Arabia on Sunday, Trump declared his commitment to the Arab nations that follow the Sunni branch of Islam, led by his hosts, the House of Saud.

Trump coupled this in a speech to a gathering of leaders from across the Muslim world with a call for them to isolate Iran, the leader of the Shia sect of Islam, which he said had “fuelled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.”

Saudi Arabia and Tehran have been at each other’s throats and wrestling for influence in the Middle East since 1979, when revolution in Iran established a Shia Muslim republic. The rivalry intensified after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and removed Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni regime, leading to the creation of a government led by the Shia majority.

Tehran and Riyadh are now using proxies to fight their wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But even in the few days since Trump’s speech, there are signs that he has emboldened Sunni factions — and that the conflict with the Shias will intensify and spread as a result.

On the sidelines of the gathering in Saudi Arabia on Monday, Trump promised Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa that he will remove the block on arms sales to the Manama regime imposed by President Barack Obama. The embargo was imposed because Obama saw that U.S. arms were being used by the Sunni royal family in the repression and abuse of Bahrain’s Shias, who make up 70 per cent of the population and are largely excluded from political and economic opportunity.

Bahrain was the scene of one of the most serious uprisings demanding reform during the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011. The protests were crushed with great brutality by Bahraini security forces, aided by the Saudi military.

But on Sunday, King Hamad got the message direct from Trump that he won’t have to worry any more about lectures from Washington about human and political rights. On Tuesday, his security forces launched a military operation against a long-running protest in the Shia town of Diraz.

One person was killed and several were injured when security forces moved to break up a sit-down protest that has been in place for months outside the home of Isa Qassim, a 79-year-old Shia cleric whom the Manama regime accuses of financial crimes and of colluding with Iran-backed terrorists. Bahrain already has banned the main opposition group, Al-Wefaq, and is now likely to crack down harder on the Shia majority.

Trump’s deliberate act of pouring gasoline on the smouldering fires of sectarian Muslim conflict is especially worrying in Lebanon, whose powerful Shia military-political movement, Hezbollah, the U.S. president called a dangerous terrorist group. After regular bouts of civil war in recent decades, Lebanon has a finely balanced political system involving the country’s Shia, Sunni and Christian factions. But friction is high over a proposed new election law, and the country could easily tumble back into conflict.

The House of Saud’s own sponsorship of terrorism — which used to drive Trump into paroxysms of rage in speeches during the presidential campaign — is beyond question. The House of Saud’s own sponsorship of terrorism — which used to drive Trump into paroxysms of rage in speeches during the presidential campaign — is beyond question.

In an overt act of diplomacy, Lebanon’s Sunni Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri left the Riyadh gathering before Trump’s condemnation of Iran was formally adopted. However, what’s worrying everyone in Lebanon now is the prospect that the Trump regime will impose more stringent financial sanctions against Hezbollah. Lebanon is a banking centre for the Middle East and its financial institutions make up one of the country’s main industries. Any attempts to impose more financial sanctions on Hezbollah inevitably would hit the country’s entire banking industry, with unpredictable economic, political and social consequences.

There also have been odd goings-on in the Gulf State of Qatar as a result of Trump’s vows of loyalty to Sunni Islam in his Riyadh speech. On Tuesday, the Qatari state news agency reported that the country’s ruler, Emir Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani, had made outspoken criticisms of Trump’s position on Iran and that the Emir was withdrawing ambassadors from other Gulf States that welcomed the president’s speech.

The news items were later denied, but not before the United Arab Emirates — Qatar’s surrounding Gulf State neighbours — had blocked the website of the Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera.

Qatar and its emir have fallen out of favour with their neighbours — especially with Saudi Arabia — because of his enthusiastic support for the most fanatical Muslim groups around the Middle East. Al Thani is a major supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates the political opposition to military rule in Egypt and whose roots go back to the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, supported (ironically) by the Saudi royal family.

Al Thani lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on the Sunni rebel militias that emerged in Syria in the uprising against Shia President Bashar al Assad in 2011 that became a full-blown civil war. Evidence has been presented to various U.S. congressional committees that Qatar also has financed the Islamic State group and al Qaida. The Emirate has a long track record, too, of financing the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

The Qatari mish-mash illustrates, if any further evidence was needed, that Trump’s decision to march shoulder-to-shoulder with Sunni Islam is entirely irrational. Well, not quite; the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu fears Iran more than Saudi Arabia, and Trump may have been influenced by Jewish votes at home and advocacy within his own family.

Another irony is that while Trump was speaking in Riyadh on Sunday, Iranians were dancing in the streets after having concluded one of the country’s most successful elections ever. The vote saw the re-election of President Hassan Rouhani, who is often described as a “moderate” and a “reformer.”

These are, of course, relative terms. Iranian public life remains dominated by a nasty claque of puritanical, religious zealots who keep strict control of the political process and the true levers of power, such as the security forces. No one with any experience of Iran expects Rouhani to be able to make significant changes, even if he wants to, which is by no means certain.

Even so, there is a form of controlled democracy in Iran — which is not the case in any of the main Sunni-controlled countries of the Middle East.

Iran undoubtedly is a sponsor of terrorism, but Tehran tends to restrict its activities to its own neighbourhood. That’s not the case with the Sunni terrorist groups, most of whom get their fundamentalist theological inspiration — and often their money — from the Saudi royal family’s pet Wahhabists.

The House of Saud’s own sponsorship of terrorism — which used to drive Trump into paroxysms of rage in speeches during the presidential campaign — is beyond question.

Some of it began innocently enough — Riyadh’s financing of the uprising in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, for instance. However, this developed into support for al Qaida’s shift from Afghan liberation movement to global terrorism outfit. That, of course, led to the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington; 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in 9/11 were Saudis.

Equally, Saudi Arabia’s dispatch of some of its most fanatical Wahhabist clerics to teach in Islamic madrassa schools in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan gave birth to the Taliban, which is still fighting for control of Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan. Those madrassas also attracted students from Muslim countries all over Asia, such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, leading to the export of Muslim extremism to those countries.

And one of Riyadh’s side projects a few years ago was to help finance Pakistan’s successful development of nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia’s deal was that, in return, Pakistan would give it access to nuclear weapons if Riyadh ever felt the need.

So it is disingenuous, to say the least, for Trump to voice outrage at Obama’s participation in the international agreement to control and limit Iran’s nuclear development program — when Trump’s new best friend, Saudi Arabia, has already secretly acquired access to such weapons.

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