CHANGE: The Great Arab Implosion and Its Consequences.

A no less and possibly more significant player is Iran, which ever since 1979, under its own Shiite brand of populist Islamism, has repositioned itself as a main contender for regional domination. Carefully cultivating downtrodden Shiite populations across the Middle East, Iran has successfully replaced their former Arab allegiances with a Shiite sectarian one. A pointed illustration of this shift is the recent report that Iran-supported Iraqi Shiite militiamen assaulting the IS-held Sunni Arab city of Fallujah had plastered their artillery shells with the name of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the prominent Shiite Saudi cleric executed earlier this year by the Saudi regime.

Today, the Iranian regime’s tentacles are to be seen everywhere from Yemen’s Houthis (who actually belong to a different Shiite sub-sect) to Sunni populist organizations like Hamas, which it assists in anti-Israeli aggression. But the main Iranian effort has been directed at establishing Shiite hegemony in Iraq and Lebanon. If successful, this, combined with a strategic alliance with Alawite-controlled Syria, would indeed create the “Shiite Crescent” across Mesopotamia and the Levant feared by Jordan’s King Abdullah, driving a stake through the heart of the Arab world and establishing Tehran’s undisputed dominion from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Mediterranean.

And success is by no means impossible: Iran’s military buildup, including its growing nuclear-threshold infrastructure, is today abetted by Russia—and, if opposed by the U.S. at all, only in the most desultory fashion.

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