Legacy Of The Big Mistake

The most brutal casualty of the Iraq war from a political standpoint is that without Saddam keeping sectarian violence in check, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are now bitter enemies as the Saudis believe that Iraqi PM Al-Malaki is an Iranian puppet.

The Saudis charge that Iraq has come under the sway of Saudi archrival Iran. But they themselves have also tried to affect Iraqi internal politics: they've thrown their support and funds behind Ayad Allawi, Maliki's main political rival, who's blocked the appointment of top security officials in the Iraqi government.

"We're trying to contain them ... it's a sectarian government," said an adviser to the Saudi government who agreed to discuss the delicate Saudi-Iraqi relations anonymously because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.

For its part, Iraq charges that insurgents are still infiltrating from Saudi Arabia. "There are a lot clerics and religious organizations that encourage and incite people to go to Iraq and fight in a so-called jihad," Labeed Abbawi, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, told McClatchy in Baghdad, skirting direct criticism of the Saudi government.

The enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iraq is just one of the many fissures in the Middle East that have widened in the almost nine years since the U.S. toppled Saddam. Now, the Arab Spring has exacerbated already existing sectarian tensions in the region at a time when the U.S. departure from Iraq leaves it with less capacity to act in the region to intervene if military conflict seems imminent.

The biggest fissure is the division between Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Shiite-led Iran. The two countries have been at loggerheads for centuries, in large part over whose branch of Islam should lead the Muslim world. But the replacement of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime with Maliki's Shiite-led government unsettled the playing field for the two countries.

And without that balance of power which we promptly wrecked over nine years, Iraq and Saudi Arabia aren't even talking anymore.  The Iraqi-Saudi border is now a major flashpoint in the world.  We knocked the Saudis off their block, something the neocons fail to mention...or wanted to happen.