Steven R. Weisman: What Civil War Could Look Like
... "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....
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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....