In the great settlement that followed the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, one of the Middle East's largest ethnic groups, the Kurds, were the main losers. They had been promised a state of their own, but, thanks to Kemal Atatürk's nationalist rebellion and abandonment of the project by the Western powers, they ended up as repressed minorities in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.

The Kurds are set to become the greatest beneficiary of whatever new order emerges from the current Western intervention in the region's affairs. This hasn't reached the scale of the earlier one, being mainly confined, in its radical form at least, to Iraq, but, in its expanding -- and unplanned -- ramifications, it could well be on the way. After all, its chief architects, the Bush administration's pro-Israeli, neo-conservative hawks, with their grandiose ideas of "creative chaos" and "regime change" everywhere, always saw Iraq as the springboard of an enterprise that, to succeed, had to be region-wide or not at all. In this respect, they are in unison with the Middle East's inhabitants, for whom it is axiomatic that what happens in Iraq affects everyone else.

At all stages in the Iraqi drama, Arab pundits and politicians have dwelt apprehensively on these wider implications. And so they are doing now with the new Iraqi constitution. It is the latest and possibly the most fateful of them, enshrining as it does a whole new concept of statehood and identity.

The Sykes-Picot agreement, the secret 1916 Anglo-French understanding that shaped the postwar settlement, drew arbitrary colonial-style frontiers across pre-existing ethnic, sectarian, tribal and commercial links and grossly affronted the Sunni-dominated pan-Arab nationalism and aspiration to unity that came with liberation from Ottoman rule. Ninety years on, Iraq now portends yet another layer of divisions that will either supplement the old ones or erase them altogether.

Advertisements

In this constitution, Iraqi Kurds don't get the independent state that, according to a recent referendum, 98 per cent of them want, but they do get gains -- vast legislative powers, control of their own militia, and authority over new discoveries of oil -- that effectively consecrate the quasi-independence they've enjoyed since Western "humanitarian" intervention on their behalf in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and that they themselves regard as a way station toward the real thing. The Iraqi republic is to be "independent, sovereign, federal, democratic and parliamentary," but one thing -- "Arab" -- it explicitly no longer is. For that, its Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, explained, would be to deny the right of its Kurdish citizens to look to membership of a greater Kurdish nation, just as its Arab citizens look to the greater Arab one.

Yet, more shocking to Sunni Arabs everywhere than this ethnic separatism is the new, intra-Arab, sectarian one. Not merely, for the first time in centuries, have Shiites established political ascendancy in a single Arab country -- and pivotal one at that -- they are doing so, like the Kurds, in the context of a constitutionally prescribed autonomy that, if Shia leaders such as Abdul Aziz Hakim mean what they say, will incorporate central and southern Iraq, more than half the country's population and, with its huge oil reserves and access to the sea, the bulk of its natural assets.

The adoption of a federal formula is seen by the Arab world not as a remedy for Iraq's inherent divisiveness but, in conditions of rising intercommunal tensions and violence, as a further stimulus to it. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the veteran Saudi foreign minister and quintessential voice of the Sunni Arab establishment, told Americans that it is "part of a dynamic pushing the Iraqi people away from each other. If you allow for this -- for a civil war to happen between Shiites and Sunnis -- Iraq is finished forever. It will be dismembered." What makes it all the more alarming is that, unlike the Kurds, Iraqi Shiites enjoy the strong support of a very powerful neighbour. Now, under its new president, Iran is clearly accumulating all the Shia-based geopolitical assets it can, from Iraq to southern Lebanon, in preparation for the grand showdown with the United States.

Arabs have long warned of the Lebanonization of Iraq, mindful, in doing so, of the fact that virtually every Western-created state in the eastern Arab world contains the latent ethnic or sectarian tensions that produced that archetype of Arab civil war.

But whereas, in concert with the U.S., they finally put out the Lebanese "fire" before it spread to themselves, their prospects of achieving the same with an Iraq at such violent loggerheads with itself would be slight, indeed. The inter-Arab state system -- and its chief institution, the Arab League -- has long been incapable of any concerted action against what, like Iraq, are perceived as threats to the basic integrity of the Arab "nation." Now the system itself is increasingly threatened by the growth of non-state activities that encompass the "nation," the cross-border traffic in extreme Islamist ideology -- along with the jihadists and suicide bombers who act on it -- or ethnic and sectarian solidarities of the kind that threaten to tear apart Iraq.

Syria, once the contentious nub of the Sykes-Picot deal, is again in the front line, alone among Arab states to be exposed to the Iraqi contagion in both its Kurdish and Shia dimensions. Thanks to the self-inflicted weakness of Iraqi Baathist rule, it was Iraqi Kurds who, in 1991, achieved the first contemporary breakthrough in the struggle of the Kurdish "nation" for self-determination. Syrian Kurds now sense similar weakness in their own, deeply troubled Baathist regime. If it collapses amid generalized chaos, many will push for secession and amalgamation with their brethren in northern Iraq.

On the Shia front, if sectarian identity is now, Iraqi-fashion, to become the organizing principle of Arab polities, then Syria is the most vulnerable to the intercommunal convulsions that will erupt. A small minority, the Alawites, has effectively run Syria for more than 40 years.

In a predominantly Sunni society, that represents an even greater anomaly than the Sunni minority rule, also in Baathist guise, that the majority Shiites and Kurds dispensed with in Iraq. A Sunni majority restoration will become especially unstoppable if, with the eventual breakup of Iraq, its disempowered Sunnis turn to Syria, of which, but for Sykes-Picot, a great many would long have been citizens anyway.

In the next most vulnerable region, the Persian Gulf, historically persecuted Shia minorities (or majority in Bahrain), inspired by the triumph of their co-religionists in Iraq, will press their claims for equality with new vigour. But nervous Sunni regimes will be loath to cede too much, not least in Saudi Arabia, where, like their terrorist alter ego in Iraq, al-Qaeda boss Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the more hidebound of the powerful Wahhabi religious hierarchy still regard Shiites as no better than heretics.

David Hirst, who reported from the Middle East for The Guardian from 1963 to 2001, is based in Beirut.