There is much wringing of hands by officials in Washington and Baghdad over the influence that the civil war in Syria is supposedly having over Iraq’s own fractious politics. Americans are certain that the sectarian barbarity in Syria will spill over into Iraq, while members of Iraq’s ruling Shiite religious coalition are terrified at the precedent of a Shiite regime falling to a Sunni rebellion. But officials in both capitals should consider that precisely the opposite may be occurring: Iraq’s newly empowered majority is contributing to the ferocity of the fighting in Syria by its absolute unwillingness to make meaningful compromises with the minority that fell from power.

As in post-2003 Iraq, it is obvious that there is a large sectarian dimension to the current Syrian conflict. The upper echelon of the regime, consisting overwhelmingly of the minority Alawi sect, has largely remained loyal because the regime has successfully convinced them that what awaits them in a post-Assad Syria is alienation, disenfranchisement and possibly much worse. Those now engaged in fighting the regime are from the Sunni majority.

The fate of Iraq’s Sunnis after the fall of Saddam Hussein fits very well with this narrative, albeit in reverse. The prevailing narrative in both countries involves domination of a majority by a cohesive minority. The new Iraqi Shiite political elites have convinced many of their constituents that the previous regime was not merely constituted by one man’s domination over the state, but rather by the minority Sunni sect collectively colluding to keep Saddam Hussein in power to repress the Shiite majority. These elites have convinced themselves that ceding any significant issue to the Sunnis risks a return of this minority to power.

Thus, there is a litany of unfulfilled promises made by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In 2008, Gen. David Petraeus brokered a series of agreements with Sunni tribal leaders, whereby they would fight against the insurgency in exchange for re-integration into Iraq’s state structures. These agreements were a sine qua non in the resultant stanching of the catastrophic violence. Yet as soon as the violence decreased, Maliki reneged on these agreements and the US did nothing. Still, the Sunnis learned a lesson from their destructive interaction with the new political order after 2003: They bided their time until, in March 2010, they voted for a list headed by a non-sectarian, pan-Iraqi nationalist, a man from a prominent Shiite family, Ayad Allawi, whose list won a plurality of seats in Parliament. It established that the Sunnis would actively support a moderate Shiite for prime minister.