The End of the Shia-Sunni Wedge An important development that seens to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon is the end of the Shia-Sunni wedge. What do I mean by that? Ever since the Islamic Revolution, the Gulf Arabs have used the Shia-Sunni divide to isolate Iran. Since the Shia are a minority in the Islamic world, this suited their purposes very well. They milked it whenever and wherever they found it useful. The entire political order dominated by the Al Khalifa in Bahrain was built on Shia exclusion. Oman was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bahrain. The others were in between. Even though Shia Iraqis had fought for him against Iran, Saddam crushed the Shia Intifida in southern Iraq with great brutality, under the watchful gaze of General Schwarzkopf and in full knowledge of the Bush Administration, using West German chemical weapons to boot. The greatest threat to Saudi Arabia was posed by the inconvenient fact that all the oil sits under the Shia-majority region in the east. Here the repression was severe but not by the standards of the Al Khalifa or Sadddam. Into this regional context, the US invaded and dismantled Saddam's regime. That unleashed the first great wave of sectarian war. The ensuring violence destroyed any chance of what the US hoped to build in Iraq. It took years of counterinsurgency and the Anbar Awakening to get the violence somewhat under control. A second great wave of sectarian violence began with the Syrian civil war. Sectarian polarization intensified as the civil war evolved into a proxy war between Iran and Hezbollah on one side, and the Sunni states on the other. It is hard to overstate the degree of sectarian bloodletting. Millions were slaughtered by both sides. What has happened this year is a great twist in the tale. The US and Israel attacked Iran after Bibi gave Trump a bully boner. This naked act of aggression, and Iran's heroic resistance to it, neutralized the great Shia-Sunni wedge that the Gulf Arabs had been working all these decades. As it pummeled US bases and Gulf states, Iran became the hero of the Islamic world across the Shia-Sunni divide, including in the Gulf states that came under Iranian fire. The defeat of the United States cemented Iran's status. Iran's heroic war against the empire dissolved the sectarian divide. And then came the Houthis. They had already won great respect and admiration for being the only power to have dared to attack Israel for the genocide. Their confessional identity, never really coded as Shia to begin with, became totally irrelevant. The Arab street and the Islamic world simply feel in love with them. They are being described as 'the only real Muslims in the world'. This is a world historic development in its own right. It is part and parcel of the end of Iranian isolation, undercutting a central component of the Gulf Arabs' strategy to contain Iran. In Yemen, it undermined the Saudi-led coalition's strategy to contain the Houthis. Central to this historical turn was the genocide in Gaza. It was Gaza that exposed the hypocrisy of the authoritarian Sunni states allied with Washington. This development is right now playing an important role constraining the Sunni states intervention in Yemen. For the Pakistanis, the Egyptians and the Turks, going after the Houthis to protect the Saudis threatens the stability of their own regimes. There is no doubt that it will have wider ramifications still. A very big development that almost no one is talking about.