Muqtada al-Sadr's Possible Flight To Iran Illustrates The Dangers Of Sectarian Conflict Expansion Beyond The Borders Of Iraq

The possible flight of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to Iran may well illustrate that the sectarian conflict in Iraq may well be expanding beyond the borders of Iraq. Likely al-Sadr has been seeking military supplies for his Mahdi Army militia organization from supporters in Iran for quite some time, whether from private persons or groups, or from major clergy or government supporters. To operate from a base outside of a nation to promote a revolution and seizing power is straight from the old playbook of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who safe from danger in Paris helped to organize the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Iran has been a popular refuge point for both major Shiite clerics who vie for the top political power in Iraq. Both Ali al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr have found Iran to be an important ally for their political goals which both seek to make Iraq a Shiite dominated theocracy to the greater extent, even more so for Muqtada al-Sadr, who would no doubt be far more rigid in his contol yet.

But yesterday's car bombing by an organization associated with Al Qaeda in Iran proves the intentions of Sunni religious extremists to carry the sectarian fight in Iraq beyond the borders of Iraq into neighboring Iran. And interests in Saudi Arabia have been funding Sunni leaders and most likely insurgent organizations within Iraq as the sectarian conflict in Iraq begins to become a proxy war by the competing Sunni and Shiite interests in the region, which could eventually spill over the borders of Iraq into a full blown regional sectarian war involving both Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Rather than securing the oil supplies in Iraq, thought to be the world's largest at 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, the Bush war policy in Iraq neither brought more oil to the world market, in fact a drop of at least 900,000 barrels a day from Iraq, or stability and security to Iraq. Instead the MidEast is now so unstable as a result of the grossly failed Bush policy towards Iraq, that a serious expanding sectarian war with competing Shiite and Sunni interests threatens to disrupt the entire oil supply from the MidEast in the future, making necessary two U.S. aircraft carriers and Patriot missiles to U.S. ally states in the region.