Taking the side of the Sunni has not worked out well for us.

At Asia Times, Angelo Codevilla analyzes US policy in the Middle East.

Today, as Daesh/ISIS — a sub-sect of Sunni Islam — murders and encourages murdering Americans, our foreign policy establishment argues that doubling down on efforts to “gain the confidence” of Sunni states, potentates, and peoples will lead them to turn against the jihadis among themselves and to fight Daesh with “boots on the ground.”

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world’s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.

...US foreign policy in the Middle East had moved to the Sunni side in 1979 after the Shia Islamic Republic’s overthrow of Iran’s secular Shah. For the previous quarter century, the Shah’s Iran had taken care of US interests in the region while muting its Persian Shia people’s perennial tensions with the Sunni Arab world.

But Iran’s Islamic Republic has been as aggressively Shia and Persian as it has been anti-American. Fatefully, rather than answering in kind the Islamic Republic’s warfare on America, all presidents since Jimmy Carter have searched the Sunni Arab world for counterweights to Iran, as well as for the kind of support that the Shah had given us.

This attempt to outsource America’s security concerns by entering into the Sunni-Shia conflict on the Sunni side has been counterproductive because the Sunni, 85% of the Muslim world, are also the nursery of its most contagious plagues — the Wahhabi sect and the Muslim Brotherhood. Above all, it has been disastrous because it has led the US government to lose sight of our own interests by confusing them with those of Sunni states and potentates.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are places where royal families and their huge retinues live sybaritic lives, where work — high and low — is done by foreigners who are despised for doing it, where expensively equipped armed forces are fit only for inter-dynastic strife and civil repression, and where foreign policy consists of paying for protection.

Even as the Saudi government was urging the US government to persist in the occupation and to make its policies Sunni-friendlier, a substantial portion the Saudi regime was financing Iraq’s Sunni anti American warriors. Just as significant for the future, Saudi Arabia’s and the Gulf monarchies’ religious establishments were preaching jihad against the Americans, which convinced countless jihadis to go to Iraq.

Thus, between mid 2003 and mid 2006, American troops in Iraq were being shot and bombed by a Sunni combination that included remnants of Saddam’s security services, ordinary local Sunni, and foreign jihadis.

The wonder of it all is that the US ruling class managed to digest this reality into the abstract narrative on which American politics ruminated and on the basis of which it doomed thousands of Americans to death and maiming in replenished minefields: namely that the Iraqis doing the bombing were fighting not for local dominance or sectarian animus but against the American way of life; that securing peace for America required creating a “united democratic Iraq,” that doing this, required “getting the Sunni to buy into” the idea; and that this required further limiting the claims of Iraq’s majority Shia while doing even more to entice the Sunni who were shooting and bombing both Americans and Shia.

This is the delusion that establishment Republican organs — the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc. — still excrete.

Read more here.