By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, New York Times
Published: February 26, 2006
Washington Bureau
"TWO days of mob violence last week after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine did not simply aggravate Iraq's sectarian hatreds. Like a near-death experience, the carnage seems to have shocked Sunni and Shiite leaders into a new realization of what civil war would cost, and new efforts to avoid it.
But what happens if such efforts — and frantic ones by Americans — prove incapable of stopping an all-out war?
What if, as Abraham Lincoln famously said of America's greatest ordeal: "All dreaded it, all sought to avert it ... And the war came."
The greatest fear of leaders throughout the Middle East is that an unrestrained civil war, if it ever comes to that, would not only give birth to warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves inside Iraq, but that the violence could also spread unpredictably through the region.
Some experts have advocated a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three main sectors for the main ethnic and religious groupings. But a violent crackup could not easily be kept stable.
It might well incite sectarian conflicts in neighboring countries and, even worse, draw these countries into taking sides in Iraq itself. Iran would side with the Shiites. It is already allied with the biggest Shiite militias, some of whose members seemed to be involved in the retaliatory attacks on Sunnis after the Shiite shrine bombing last week.
And Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait would feel a need to defend Sunnis or perhaps to create buffer states for themselves along Iraq's borders. Turkey might also feel compelled to move in, to protect Iraq's Turkoman minority against a Kurdish state in the north.
If Iraq were to sink deeper into that kind of conflict, Baghdad and other cities could become caldrons of ethnic cleansing, bringing revenge violence from one region to another. Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia, where Shiites happen to live in the oil-rich eastern sector, could easily revolt. Such a regional conflict could take years to exhaust itself, and could force the redrawing of boundaries that themselves are less than 100 years old.
"A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario.""
Despite US Gov't propoganda to keep the masses at home happy; Things seem to be balancing on a hair; and a slight breath one way or the other could mean all the difference.
It has come to my attention that the US and British Commands have been busy updating contingency plans in case the country descends in to chaos and civil war. Some of those plans include withdrawl to cantonments in remote or uncontested areas and a rapid withdrawl through Kuwait and S Saudi Arabia as well as to Kurdish held areas of the north.
I am so glad the Bush Administration is certain everything is proceeding to plan. My mind rests much easier knowing that all is well and our troops are safe.
R