Sectarian killings point to looming civil war

The recent spike in violence in Iraq is becoming centred on sectarian killings, causing security experts to wonder whether Iraq is becoming an unwinnable war for the US and its coalition partners.

Both, the conflict and the rising tensions seem more visibly defined along confessional divisions.

"A largely Sunni insurgency targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings; while Shiite death squads, some with links to the interior ministry, retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders," are early signs of a looming civil war in Iraq according to John Burns of the New York Times.

Burns said, "The rise of suicide attacks and the return of the insurgency to areas from which it had been driven warn that Iraqis are entering a period of civil war."

He warns, "The war's wider pattern holds the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, of the kind that largely destroyed Lebanon."

Others agree. John Pike of Global Security, which keeps a close watch over Iraq said, "The Iraqi insurgency just keeps getting stronger. He cites recent kidnappings of foreign diplomats, the murder of moderate Sunni politicians, and events like the bombing [in Al Museib] near Baghdad leaves Iraqis and others believing the democratic process that has been unfolding since the Americans restored Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004 has failed to isolate the insurgents and indeed, has become the target itself."

While the number of attacks has remained the same about 65 a day, according to US military officials American commanders say that the attacks are increasingly sophisticated, and that "the insurgents seem to replenish their ranks as fast as they are depleted."

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from January to April 2004, said, "The fate of Iraq's transition is yet to be determined."

He explained, "While it is strongly in the American interest, morally and strategically, to help Iraq build a democracy, the Bush administration has made it difficult for these objectives to be decided in the US's favour."

There is another way the US could fail in Iraq. That would be for the pro-Iranian fundamentalists (the most militant among the ruling Shiite alliance) to conquer power through political force, intimidation, and intrigue.

"That has begun to happen in Iraq, with the steadily rising power of SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq so named for a reason) and its 15,000-man militia, the Badr Organisation (trained in Iran by the Revolutionary Guards)," according to Diamond.

This has helped mobilise other militant militias to join in the fight on either side. British writer Patrick Cockburn recently warned, "Not only is winning the war in Iraq a questionable outcome, but the battles there have inspired a worldwide insurgency."

He said that, "Iraq has now joined the Boer War of 1899 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 as ill-conceived ventures that have done Britain more harm than good."

Some however, believe otherwise. James Cara-fano, a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation said, "The idea that increased insurgent attacks on civilians will inevitably collapse Iraq's fledgling democracy is utterly wrongheaded because the insurgency as a strategy lacks a theory of victory."

Meanwhile, Iraqis are more divided and frustrated than ever as they see their country descend into sectarian chaos, amidst domestic, regional and international uncertainties on how the country will be sewn back together.

For future historians, Iraq will probably replace Vietnam as the stock example of the truth of aphorisms about small wars escalating into big ones.

Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in 2003 that Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing its neighbours.

Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory. Now in 2005, they find to their horror that there are people in Iraq more dangerous than Saddam Hussain and they may be mired in an unwinnable conflict.

The writer is an Arab journalist based in Washington