Civil war in Iraq

In the war in Iraq, the "worst-case scenario has always been a full-blown civil war between its former Sunni ruling class and the long-oppressed Shiite majority with U.S. forces caught in the middle" and the "new worst-case scenario has Iran or Syria getting directly involved as the body counts rise. Iraqi security forces are obviously incapable of keeping the peace. Americans can't leave but don't have the numbers to impose martial law on the entire country and, in the process, expose themselves to greater risk." [1]

New "outbursts of violence" in a "series of suicide attacks, car bombs and mortar barrages rocked Baghdad" February 28, 2006, killing "more than 75 people" and wounding many. Two explosions on March 1, 2006, left another 26 dead and 65 wounded, as Iraq "teetered on the brink of sectarian civil war." [2][3][4]

"The past six days of violence that have convulsed Iraq since the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine [the week before] could be much worse than Iraqi and Coalition officials have admitted," Chris Allbritton wrote in TIME. The Washington Post reported February 28, 2006, "that more than 1,300 bodies had been delivered to the Baghdad morgue, directly challenging the Iraqi government’s assertion that 216 people had been killed around the country since the Wednesday bombing of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra.

"Hundreds of bodies were packed into the morgue, the paper reported, and wailing relatives clustered around the doorway hoping to claim the body of a loved one," Allbritton wrote.

"The fresh violence could re-ignite the hostility between Sunnis and Shiites just as Iraqis struggle to recover from the worst sectarian bloodletting since the war began," New York Times' Edward Wong reported. "Though politicians and clerics have been calling for calm, and a weekend curfew cooled off the fury in the streets, people across the capital remained anxious over the possibility of new violence."

Background

According to Spengler in the January 21, 2004 edition of the Asia Times, civil war in Iraq may be preferable, as well as advantageous, to the United States. After all, it asked, "which is better, to have Iraqis shooting at American soldiers, or at each other?"

"No one in the Bush administration wants to let slip the dogs of civil war. On the contrary, the White House still hopes that Iraq will set a precedent for democracy in the Muslim world. Yet civil war is the path of least resistance, so clearly so that the punditry of the world press has raised the alarm with one voice. A Google news search turns up 900 hits for the search terms 'Iraq' and 'civil war'. What is so bad about a civil war? No self-respecting state ever has been formed without one. All the European countries had at least one (some of them called religious wars). America has had two. The Middle East and Africa have them all the time. States are founded on compromise. Civil war is just nature's way of telling the diehards to slow down."

In the end, the real answer is this: "Americans are accustomed to happy endings. President George W. Bush wants to be remembered as the benefactor of the Muslim world, not as a second Genghis Khan. Only in the paranoid imaginings of the Muslim world has Washington set out to destabilize the region. ... Nonetheless, the tragedy will proceed as Washington at each step discovers that its only viable option is the one that pushes Iraq closer to dissolution."

Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay wrote January 22, 2004, for Knight Ridder that "current and former U.S. officials ... are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war." This "starkly" contradicts, they said, "the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address."

"The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. ... Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"'Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time,' said one intelligence officer. 'They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before.'"

"Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are 'broadly held within the government,' including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

"Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30. ... L. Paul Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government."

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Coalition Provisional Authority
• Exit Strategy from Iraq
• Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists
• Iraqi Constitution
• Iraqi Interim Government
• Iraqi insurgency
• Iraqi media
• Iraqi national elections
• Iraqi sovereignty: Exit Strategy from Iraq
• Iraqi sovereignty: June 30, 2004
• Iraqi unified resistance
• new Iraq / post-war Iraq
• new Iraqi army
• Occupation forces in Iraq
• Oil and War in Iraq
• Operation Iraqi Freedom
• Reckless escalation of adversity
• Shiite Muslim uprising in Iraq
• Terrorist attacks in Iraq
• U.S. Central Command

External Links

2004

• "When Sistani speaks, Bush listens," Asia Times, January 17, 2004.
• Naomi Klein, "Bush's Iraq: An Appointocracy," Globe & Mail (Canada), January 22, 2004.
• Marc Erikson, "Why Saddam's arrest did matter," Asia Times, January 24, 2004: "The Saddam arrest could very well prove a turning point - for the worse only if collective US foreign and intelligence services' memory utterly fails. That - given customary State Department and CIA institutional lack of attention span - cannot, of course, be ruled out. The crucial issue is what policy the United States adopts toward elements of the Iraqi resistance cast loose by the capture of their nominal leader."

2006

• Nancy A. Youssef, "Sunnis say they're mobilizing to combat Shiites, protect mosques," Knight Ridder Newspapers, February 27, 2006.
• Gregory Djerejian, "Spinning the Prospective Blood Bath," The Belgravia Dispatch, February 28, 2006.
• Alexandra Zavis, "Civil War Looms With 66 Killed in Baghdad," Associated Press, February 28, 2006.
• Chris Allbritton, "Disparate Death Toll Sparks Sunni Outcry. Reports of higher casualties rates in Iraq’s recent sectarian violence stokes Sunni distrust of Government," TIME, February 28, 2006.
• Zaineb Obeid and Tom Lasseter, "Iraq bombings kill at least 55; Cabinet says 379 died last week," Knight Ridder Newspapers (Mercury News), February 28, 2006.
• Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti, "Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300. Morgue Count Eclipses Other Tallies Since Shrine Attack," Washington Post, February 28, 2006.
• Sameer N. Yacoub, "Update 26: Bomb Attacks Kill 26 in Baghdad," Associated Press (Forbes), March 1, 2006.
• Kim Landers, "Iraq on the brink of civil war," ABC News (Australia), March 1, 2006.
• John Shovelan, "US troops in Iraq stay out of sectarian conflict," The World Today - ABC News (Australia), March 1, 2006.
• Editorial: "Iraq: Civil war precipice," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 1, 2006.
• Edward Wong, "75 killed in spate of bomb attacks. U.S. envoy says earlier violence put nation on 'brink of civil war'," New York Times (San Francisco Chronicle), March 1, 2006.
• "Sunni Group Says U.S., Iraqi Government Stirring Sectarianism," Bloomberg News, March 1, 2006.
• Editorial: "Advantage, Chaos. Situation in Iraq nears worst-case worries," Detroit Free Press, March 1, 2006.
• "Attacks, death toll climb as curfew's effects fade," Associated Press (Seattle Times), March 1, 2006.
• "68 killed in Iraq after curfew lifted," Indy Star, March 1, 2006.
• "64 dead, 182 injured in Iraq explosions," Daily Times (Pakistan), March 1, 2006.
• Ellen Knickmeyer, "Pressure Seen on Probes at Baghdad Morgue. Former U.N. Envoy Says 'Both Sides' Exerting Influence; Death Count in Dispute," Washington Post, March 1, 2006.
• "'Wash Post' Cites 'Pressure' on Iraq Death Count," Editor & Publisher, March 1, 2006.
• Juan Cole, "Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's. As Americans finally begin to grasp the magnitude of the Iraq catastrophe, Bush's popularity hits a new low," Salon, March 1, 2006.