I can't think of a time the Shiites haven't raped the Sunnis every time they have gotten in recent military conflict. Hezbollah is nothing to fuck with, and Iran fucked over Iraq in the 1980s despite the Saudis pouring unbelievable amounts of money into the Iraqi war machine.
That was actually a very similar scenario to what we have now -- in the 1980s Iraq waged a war of aggression against Iran, funded primarily by Gulf Sunni states but also by the US and France. The later Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the Iraq Wars, were in large part blowback from the failed Saudi effort to use Iraq to do its dirty work. A bankrupted and failed Iraq, crushed under the repayment obligations for its war debts, desperately needed money, and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia suddenly looked like tempting military targets. Saudi Arabia, of course, called in its lapdog mercenary, the U.S., to beat the Iraqi threat down.
Actually most recent Middle-Eastern history can be explained largely as Saudi Arabia's failed attempts to control the region with money. In the West, people always remember the role that Western states played in such conflicts, but the reality is that most of the money and most of the political push comes from the Gulf.
