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Sunni Arab regimes will be warily eyeing the outcome of the referendum on Iraq's constitution, fearing the new charter will enshrine Shiite domination of the country and increase the risk of civil war, analysts say, according to AFP news despatch from Amman.
Adding to a potent brew is the looming presence of overwhelmingly Shiite Iran -- until Iraq's election the only country in the region with a Shiite government -- with an unprecedented chance to have a say in its neighbour's destiny.
The constitution would allow the Shiites to form a super region out of their oil-rich southern strongholds and Sunni opponents of the document have argued furiously this degree of federalism would hasten Iraq's break-up.
The prospect of the majority Shiites controlling Iraq for the foreseeable future after their marginalisation under the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein is a bitter pill to swallow for the Sunni states in the region.
Jordanian analyst Hassan Barari said there were widespread fears in the Arab world that "the Shiite majority in Iraq constitutes a Trojan horse to carry Iranian influence across the region".
In December Jordan's King Abdullah II sounded the alarm by accusing the clerical regime in Iran of trying to influence the landmark Iraqi elections in January in a bid to create a "crescent" dominated by Shiites extending from Iraq to Lebanon.
Arab regimes like regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia that themselves have Shiite minorities fear Iran's growing influence over Iraq could destabilise their governments.
"The Saudi fears are not political they stem from security concerns," said Barari.
The debate over the constitution has already exacerbated tensions between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq and analysts are warning the charter risks sparking a civil war which could spill over well outside Iraq's borders.
"The prospects of a religious war breaking out in Iraq is looming on the horizon and could be fuelled by any attempt to tamper with the results of the referendum," said Wahid Abdel Majid, of the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Strategic Study Center.
"The situation in Iraq is not expected to improve but to worsen," Abdel Majid commented.
As the Shiites grow stronger they will incur the wrath of Sunni insurgents, led by Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was vowed an all-out war against them, he added.
These factors could prove a recipe for catastrophe, provoking a conflict which will force a response from all the regional powers, he warned.
"The war will eventually become a regional conflict, with intervention from Iran, the Saudis and the Turks and other countries, and the Americans will be unable to stop it," Abdel Majid said.
Burhan Ghalioun, a professor of political sciences at the Sorbonne University in Paris, said Arab governments only have themselves to blame for the situation in Iraq after sitting on their hands after Saddam's fall.
Many Iraqis feel the 22-member League has not provided enough support for the country's post-war reconstruction and has been slow to condemn the largely Sunni-backed insurgency that regularly targets Shiites and Kurds.
Meanwhile, AP reported from Baghdad Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's faction has claimed responsibility for attacks that have left hundreds of Iraqis dead, and the United States has called him the most dangerous terrorist in Iraq.
Still, even as al-Zarqawi threatens more chaos -- in recordings and Internet messages -- many Iraqis believe the Jordanian militant does not even exist and is merely a phantom created by the Americans to sow unrest in the country.
Similar disbelief greeted Britain's explanation that its soldiers, arrested in southern Iraq disguised as Arabs, were on an undercover hunt for terrorists. Instead, some Iraqis argue the soldiers were out to kill Shiite Muslims and blame the murders on Sunnis in hopes of sparking civil war.
Such conspiracy theories are common among Arabs and may seem laughable to outsiders. But in Iraq, where rulers from British colonists to Saddam Hussein regularly played one ethnic group against the other, imagined plots can seem reasonable -- a fact that may have dire consequences for U.S. efforts to build a stable Iraqi government.
U.S. officials had hoped that rifts, more common between the Shiites and Sunnis, would have been overcome with the June 2004 handover of sovereignty and the January elections that brought the current government to power.
But each time, the same hardline Shiite and Sunni groups who had ridiculed the war to topple Saddam as a U.S. effort to seize control over Iraqi oil, remained unconvinced.
As a result, little has changed in Iraq, once the seat of proud Islamic empires upon which Iraqis now look back in wonder as they survey a landscape pockmarked by bombs and sown with civilian corpses.
While many Sunnis have denounced the civilian deaths, their refusal to condemn al-Zarqawi directly had fueled Shiite resentment of their sect and further exacerbated frustration over the Sunni stand against the constitution.
The dominant force under Saddam, Sunnis worry that clauses dealing with federalism will lead to a splintering of the country:
Shiite and Kurdish states in the oil-rich south and north, and a wasteland of deserts and date palms for Sunnis in the middle.
In the Shiite-dominated South, the odd alliance with the Sunnis in opposing U.S. and British as occupiers is enforced by memories of the brutal quashing of a Shiite-led 1920 rebellion against rule by the British, who largely pocketed the proceeds from the country's oil wealth during the colonial era.
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