Middle East Conflict - Shia vs. Sunni

One of the biggest drivers of conflict in the Middle East today is the enormous tension and violence between Sunni and Shia. The wars in Syria and in Yemen split largely between Sunni and Shia. But is that conflict really about religion?

Both confessions have gotten along fine for much of the Middle Easts history, and the Sunni-Shia divide was just not so important for the region's politics. In the 1980s, for example, the biggest conflict in the Middle East was between two Shia-majority countries — Iran and Iraq. That changed in 1979. After the revolution Iran started to interfere in internal Arab affairs of countries around them.

Another major turning point was in 2003, when the United States led the invasion of Iraq, to find Saddams weapons of mass destruction (haha!). He was hostile to both Iran and to Saudi and those two countries saw him as a threat. He held the Middle East in a sort of balance.

There is hardly a country in the middle east in which the fingerprints of the conflict between Tehran and Riyadh cannot be seen:

In 2011, when the Arab Spring began upending governments across the Middle East, both Saudi Arabia and Iran again tried to fill the vacuums (2003 Déjà-vu!). This is a big part of why the Middle East is so divided today between Sunni and Shia: In weak states, Iran and Saudi Arabia have tried to position themselves as the representatives of their respective religious clans so as to gain influence.

Lebanon, where for more than a year and a half there has been no president, partly because of the tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran; Yemen, where a civil war is being waged with the direct intervention of Saudi forces and Iranian advisers; You can see the same thing unfolding on a national scale in Syria. The violence at first had little to do with religion: It was about the Syrian people versus a tyrannical government. But the Syrian government is allied with Iran, which means it is hostile to Saudi Arabia, so the Saudis see it as...