The Worst Case Scenario In The Middle East, In One Sentence

Ali Khedery, the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq (2003 - 09), recently sat down with Reza Akhlaghi of the Foreign Policy Association to discuss American policy in the Middle East.

The candid discussion highlights several mistakes made by the U.S. in the 21st century, and lays out some troubling potential scenarios for the future if circumstances continue to worsen.

"As the Middle East unravels, the U.S. and its allies will be the real losers because we won't be able to contain these cancers of sectarian war and transnational jihad," Khedery, who now is now chairman and chief executive of the Dubai-based Dragoman Partners, told Akhlaghi. "Radicals will grow in strength on both sides, namely the Salafist ISIS and the Shia militias, eventually driving the entire region towards destabilization, inevitably threatening global energy supplies and the global economy."

Iraq accounts for 61% of expected growth in output capacity of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by 2018. And while most reserves are in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia south, an Iraq that's on fire is not good for supply lines.

Furthermore, all signs indicate an intensifying Shia-Sunni war stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Iran as the Tehran-backed and Shia dominated governments of Syria and Iraq face largely Sunni insurgencies dominated by the growing army of ISIS.

And both sides have become increasingly sectarian: In northern Iraq, ISIS has slaughtered hundreds of people whom they consider apostates, while Shia militiamen have committed large-scale killings of Sunnis in southern Iraq.

As ISIS (formerly al-Qaeda in Iraq) consolidates its control of Sunni Iraq, Khedery notes that in 2010 "Washington betrayed the promises that the U.S. government had made to the Sunni tribal leaders, the same leaders that had fought al-Qaeda [in Iraq] throughout the 'Awakening.'"

Those tribal leaders, who the U.S. now wants to fight ISIS (also known as Islamic State), are calling for international guarantee for Sunni rights to be integrated into a newly-reformed political order in Baghdad.

"The IS problem would end. If they guarantee us this solution, we'll guarantee to get rid of IS," Mr. al-Zubaai, a tribal leader from Anbar province speaking on behalf of the rebels, told BBC.

If the Sunni tribes are not brought back into the fold, there is an increased chance that Iraqi Sunni youth will radicalize.

"If things stay the same, a new generation will emerge, beyond the control of the US or Iran or Syria - hundreds of thousands of young men will join up with IS," Zubaai warned.

Khedery lays part of the blame for the current crisis at Obama's feet. He says that America's continued support of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in December 2010 made it so that "Iraq's path toward civil war was really inevitable." Maliki's new lease on life led him to steer Baghdad "toward a very pro-Iranian and sectarian agenda, which inevitably disillusioned and disenfranchised Sunni Arabs for a second time."

The subsequent events are what brought us to today's precarious situation.

"Then given Maliki's misrule in Iraq and Assad's misrule in Syria and their cooperation along with the Iranians and Hezbollah to wage a campaign of genocide, led to a region-wide sectarian war while the United States under President Obama stood back and watched and did nothing as the violence spiraled further and further out of control," Khedery added.