I think one of the most troubling issues on the horizon is the attempt by radicals on both sides, Sunni and Shiite, to foment this trouble. Almost 50 years ago now, the highest Shiite authority, Ayatollah Boroujerdi, and the highest Sunni authority, Sheikh Shaltut, the mufti of Al Assad University in Cairo, decided to write a very historic document that basically said Shiism is an accepted school of Islam. Till then, the Sunnis did not accept Shiism as an acceptable interpretation of Islam. That began to heal this wound that had existed for many, many centuries.
In recent weeks, for example, Mr. Qardavi, one of the most popular television personalities in the Arab world and the Sunni world issued a declaration that says the Shiites are heretics. Some of the more radical Iranian Shiites responded by declaring Wahhabism, which is a form of Shiism in Saudi Arabia, a form of heresy.
We know that both the Iranian regime and the Saudi regime are spending billions of dollars promoting their versions of Islam throughout the world, and Wahhabism particularly is very, very exclusivist in its interpretation of Islam. If they become dominant, and there is a lot of indication that they might, I think we are in for a long night of resurgence of this Shiite-Sunni bloodletting.
If it happens, and I hope it doesn't--I hope that wiser, cooler heads will prevail--you're absolutely right: it will flow into Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait, In all of these countries of the Persian Gulf, there is a very substantial Shiite minority. In Saudi Arabia, the Shiites are at 20%, but they live in the most important oil-rich regions of Saudi Arabia. If the Iranian regime decides to foment these into a sort of rising Shiite arc, I think it is going to be a major threat. I'm still hopeful that they will pull back and that wiser heads will prevail.
As to the mujahedeen, as you know, the mujahedeen were a group of Iranians. They began as a terrorist organization in Iran in 1964. They engaged in several acts of terrorism against the ancien régime, including the killing of some Americans. Then they became an ally of the Islamic Republic. Then they had a falling-out with the Islamic Republic and took up arms against the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic slaughtered them, truly, in one of the egregious breaches of human rights. When I talked about the 4,000 people killed in prison, many of those 4,000 were imprisoned members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, because the regime was concerned.
But the mujahedeen did something that put them very much, I would say, on the outs with the Iranian population, which was that they settled in Iraq when Iraq was fighting Iran and began helping the Iraqi regime when the Iraqi regime was attacking Iran, so they lost a lot of their credibility. When Saddam Hussein fell, the U.S. government offered these people protected status. That meant that they needed to have protection; they couldn't engage in political activity.
But the Shiite leaders of Iraq, many of whom are very close to the regime in Iran, have been insistent on trying either to send some of the mujahedeen back to Iran or to kick them out of Iraq. While the U.S. had control over the Ashraf camp where these people were, they were treated with dignity and with the right attitude. When the Iraqi government took over, they went into these camps with full force, I suspect with the instigation of the Iranian regime. There are indications that these people are being beaten.
Although I do not accept the politics of the mujahedeen and think they are more of a cultic phenomenon than a legitimate political group, I think their human rights need to be respected. I think they should have been given all the legal protection that any human being deserves, and I don't think the Iraqi government did that. I think the international community must be as concerned about breaches of these people's human rights as it would be for breaches of the human rights of any other minority anywhere in the world.