Post-Saddam Iraq is a sectarian construct in which power is allotted by ethno-sectarian weight.
A WIDENING arc of violence across Iraq is raising fears that the country could fracture under the weight of sectarian and political strife.
With the Middle East now dividing sharply along sectarian lines, Morsi has thrown his weight behind a powerful group of Sunni states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey that support Syria's rebels – with only Shia Iran, evermore isolated, backing Assad and his Shia Alawite-led regime.
It gathered weight when people watched the sectarian behaviour of Iraq's religious leaders, particularly among the Shia.
The Brotherhood accused Shi'ites of being at the root of sectarian conflicts throughout history and threw its weight behind holy war - just months after a high-profile rapprochement with Iran, which backs Bashar al-Assad and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
While sectarian tensions are nothing new here, the added weight of events in Syria could plunge the city back into violence if given the right spark.
A Catholic born in a border town in the Republic of Ireland, Finbar "Barry" McGuigan married a Protestant from the North and contested the majority of his fights in a fraught Belfast that was buckling under the weight of a sustained period of bloody sectarian violence.
Three years after the Arab uprisings started, the weight of a millennium and a half of sectarian rivalry is crushing hopes of a better future.
Without them, it will be harder to make a deal stick.In a reminder of the wider peril generated by Syria's agony, a big car-bomb exploded near Lebanon's border with Syria on December 17th, probably aimed at Hizbullah, Lebanon's Shia militia that has thrown its weight behind Mr Assad, widening Lebanon's own stark sectarian rifts.
Although she attempted to ease sectarian tensions, offering Dublin a role, peace efforts collapsed beneath the weight of Unionist opposition.
The Troubles, three decades of late-20th-century sectarian terror that took at least 3,500 lives, was the latest iteration of that dead weight of memory.
