Post by sciwriter on Feb 26, 2006 22:31:03 GMT -7
Do you think civil war will erupt in the Mideast? If yes, who will be involved? Carl
www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/weekinreview/26weis.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
February 26, 2006
Aftershocks
What Civil War Could Look Like
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON
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."
A first question for the United States if a general collapse of order seemed to
be in the offing would be what to do with its 130,000 troops in Iraq.
"We would probably have to get out of the way," said Larry Diamond, who advised
the American occupation in Baghdad in 2004 and is now a senior fellow at
Stanford's Hoover Institution. "We wouldn't have nearly enough troops to quell
the violence at that point. At a minimum, we'd have to pull back to certain
military bases and try to keep working the politics."
Modern civil wars have been resolved by negotiations, but only after they were
deepened by the intervention of outsiders. Internal conflict in the Democratic
Republic of Congo in the late 1990's led to intervention by troops from Rwanda,
Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The Balkan wars erupted after the breakup
of Yugoslavia earlier in that decade, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The
power-sharing arrangements that were worked out remain precarious, backed up by
NATO troops.
In events closer to Iraq, more than 15 years of civil war in Lebanon ended when
Syrian troops took on the role of reinforcing a peculiar arrangement that
distributes certain high offices among the country's sectarian groups. Even the
West at first welcomed the Syrians as a stabilizing factor - until last year,
when they withdrew under European and American pressure.
BUT Iraq poses a threat that dwarfs these problems. The pivot of what could
become a regional conflict is almost certainly Iran. Shiite leaders close to
Iran won the Iraqi election in December, and although American and many Iraqi
leaders defend their Iraqi nationalist bona fides, a civil war would almost
certainly drive them to seek help from Iran. That stirs Sunni Arab fears of
Iranian dominance in the region.
"What you have in Iraq is not just a society coming apart like Yugoslavia or
Congo," said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of national affairs at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "What is at stake is not just Iraq's
stability but the balance of power in the region."
Historians looking at such a prospect would see a replay of the Shiite-Sunni
divide that has effectively racked the Middle East since the eighth century and
extended through the rival Safavid and Ottoman Empires in modern Mesopotamia and
finally into the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's. This time, however, Iran's
suspected nuclear ambitions could accelerate a nuclear arms race, with Saudi
Arabia likely to lead the way among Sunni nations.
While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed that the world has
isolated Iran more than ever because of its nuclear ambitions, Iran has in fact
tightened relationships with it local allies as events in Iraq have played out.
In recent months, Iran has been deepening its alliance with Syria and the Shiite
movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it appears ready to strike up a
friendship, backed by financing, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denunciation of the bombing of the Shiite shrine
in Samarra last week, in which he blamed Zionists rather than Sunnis, could be
seen as an act of restraint, these experts say - an effort to play to Shiite
anger without fanning flames between Iraq's Islamic communities.
Whatever role Iran plays, many experts see another danger from a civil war in
which American forces are forced to the sidelines in Iraq's angry Sunni areas.
Those areas would almost certainly become safe havens for terrorist groups
posing a long-term threat to other Arab countries and the West, especially the
United States and Israel.
"You can be sure that Al Qaeda will set up shop in the Sunni areas, just like
they did in the Afghan civil war," said Kenneth M. Pollack, director of research
at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.
Mr. Pollack cautions that a civil war could prove especially painful for the
Shiites. There is no reason, he says, to assume that they won't fight among
themselves. The three major Shiite movements each have militias. Sometimes they
have clashed. Iran, he said, would just as soon avoid a violent fragmentation
along those lines.
"The first thing you would see in an Iraq civil war is an intra-Shia civil war,"
Mr. Pollack said. "There are a thousand Shiite militias that could do battle
against each other, splintering even the southern part of Iraq."
Not all experts on Iraq think that an eruption of civil war will necessarily
draw in outside nations. Turks, for example, might be tempted to intervene,
especially if a Kurdish state were set up in the north, tempting Kurds to rebel
in eastern Turkey. But Turkey would also not want to alienate members of the
European Union, which it is trying desperately to join, according to Morton
Abramowitz, a longtime diplomat who is now a senior fellow at the Century
Foundation. "The Turks would not like what's going on, but they're prudent," he
said.
Another possible alternative to a huge intervention from the outside could come
in the form of an organized regional effort, backed by the United Nations or the
Europeans, to broker a political solution. Or Sunni Arab states, through an
organization like the Arab League, might try to send in an international force
to stabilize the country.
Surveying all the nightmare possibilities in an interview late last week, Zalmay
Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, said: "Those are issues that
some people should be thinking about, but I do not believe that we are heading
that way. The leaders of Iraq know that they came to the brink with the attack
on the shrine, and there has been an evolution of their attitudes as a result. I
simply believe that the leaders of Iraq do not want a civil war."
Lincoln, however, said in retrospect that having leaders who do not want war is
not enough - that the problem is whether there are things that they want more
than war, and are willing to accept war to get. In Iraq, it seems, this will
also determine whether the leaders will one day say with satisfaction that they
stepped back from the brink or, sadly like Lincoln, that "the war came."
www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/weekinreview/26weis.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
NY TIMES
February 26, 2006
Aftershocks
What Civil War Could Look Like
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON
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."
A first question for the United States if a general collapse of order seemed to
be in the offing would be what to do with its 130,000 troops in Iraq.
"We would probably have to get out of the way," said Larry Diamond, who advised
the American occupation in Baghdad in 2004 and is now a senior fellow at
Stanford's Hoover Institution. "We wouldn't have nearly enough troops to quell
the violence at that point. At a minimum, we'd have to pull back to certain
military bases and try to keep working the politics."
Modern civil wars have been resolved by negotiations, but only after they were
deepened by the intervention of outsiders. Internal conflict in the Democratic
Republic of Congo in the late 1990's led to intervention by troops from Rwanda,
Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The Balkan wars erupted after the breakup
of Yugoslavia earlier in that decade, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The
power-sharing arrangements that were worked out remain precarious, backed up by
NATO troops.
In events closer to Iraq, more than 15 years of civil war in Lebanon ended when
Syrian troops took on the role of reinforcing a peculiar arrangement that
distributes certain high offices among the country's sectarian groups. Even the
West at first welcomed the Syrians as a stabilizing factor - until last year,
when they withdrew under European and American pressure.
BUT Iraq poses a threat that dwarfs these problems. The pivot of what could
become a regional conflict is almost certainly Iran. Shiite leaders close to
Iran won the Iraqi election in December, and although American and many Iraqi
leaders defend their Iraqi nationalist bona fides, a civil war would almost
certainly drive them to seek help from Iran. That stirs Sunni Arab fears of
Iranian dominance in the region.
"What you have in Iraq is not just a society coming apart like Yugoslavia or
Congo," said Vali R. Nasr, a professor of national affairs at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "What is at stake is not just Iraq's
stability but the balance of power in the region."
Historians looking at such a prospect would see a replay of the Shiite-Sunni
divide that has effectively racked the Middle East since the eighth century and
extended through the rival Safavid and Ottoman Empires in modern Mesopotamia and
finally into the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's. This time, however, Iran's
suspected nuclear ambitions could accelerate a nuclear arms race, with Saudi
Arabia likely to lead the way among Sunni nations.
While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed that the world has
isolated Iran more than ever because of its nuclear ambitions, Iran has in fact
tightened relationships with it local allies as events in Iraq have played out.
In recent months, Iran has been deepening its alliance with Syria and the Shiite
movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it appears ready to strike up a
friendship, backed by financing, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denunciation of the bombing of the Shiite shrine
in Samarra last week, in which he blamed Zionists rather than Sunnis, could be
seen as an act of restraint, these experts say - an effort to play to Shiite
anger without fanning flames between Iraq's Islamic communities.
Whatever role Iran plays, many experts see another danger from a civil war in
which American forces are forced to the sidelines in Iraq's angry Sunni areas.
Those areas would almost certainly become safe havens for terrorist groups
posing a long-term threat to other Arab countries and the West, especially the
United States and Israel.
"You can be sure that Al Qaeda will set up shop in the Sunni areas, just like
they did in the Afghan civil war," said Kenneth M. Pollack, director of research
at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution.
Mr. Pollack cautions that a civil war could prove especially painful for the
Shiites. There is no reason, he says, to assume that they won't fight among
themselves. The three major Shiite movements each have militias. Sometimes they
have clashed. Iran, he said, would just as soon avoid a violent fragmentation
along those lines.
"The first thing you would see in an Iraq civil war is an intra-Shia civil war,"
Mr. Pollack said. "There are a thousand Shiite militias that could do battle
against each other, splintering even the southern part of Iraq."
Not all experts on Iraq think that an eruption of civil war will necessarily
draw in outside nations. Turks, for example, might be tempted to intervene,
especially if a Kurdish state were set up in the north, tempting Kurds to rebel
in eastern Turkey. But Turkey would also not want to alienate members of the
European Union, which it is trying desperately to join, according to Morton
Abramowitz, a longtime diplomat who is now a senior fellow at the Century
Foundation. "The Turks would not like what's going on, but they're prudent," he
said.
Another possible alternative to a huge intervention from the outside could come
in the form of an organized regional effort, backed by the United Nations or the
Europeans, to broker a political solution. Or Sunni Arab states, through an
organization like the Arab League, might try to send in an international force
to stabilize the country.
Surveying all the nightmare possibilities in an interview late last week, Zalmay
Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, said: "Those are issues that
some people should be thinking about, but I do not believe that we are heading
that way. The leaders of Iraq know that they came to the brink with the attack
on the shrine, and there has been an evolution of their attitudes as a result. I
simply believe that the leaders of Iraq do not want a civil war."
Lincoln, however, said in retrospect that having leaders who do not want war is
not enough - that the problem is whether there are things that they want more
than war, and are willing to accept war to get. In Iraq, it seems, this will
also determine whether the leaders will one day say with satisfaction that they
stepped back from the brink or, sadly like Lincoln, that "the war came."