IHT: The nightmare of civil war is looming over Iraq

[deminks]

The first signs that top U.S. officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty, the new American team that arrived then, headed by John Negroponte as ambassador, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer 3rd.

The new team called the departing Americans "the illusionists," for their conviction that the United States could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism.

(snip)

Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true. Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports that Shiite death squads, some with links to the Interior Ministry, are retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

(snip)

That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Center there two weeks ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, Negroponte's successor as ambassador. In his remarks, Khalilzad abandoned a convention that had bound senior U.S. officials when speaking of Iraq: To talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/25/news/baghdad.php

[dave502d]

1. I said the same thing about 3 months ago hear at DU.

Civil war in Iraq is what ** people want.Without it they can never
get what they want.