Word: civilizations
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Rice's chances for success aren't great. Olmert's job-approval ratings are even more dismal than Bush's, and Abbas is struggling to prevent clashes among rival factions from escalating into civil war. And then there's the trouble with Rice herself. She did herself few favors in Arab eyes by failing to restrain Israel's bombing campaign against Lebanon last summer. Her refusal to negotiate with Syria baffles diplomats in the region, who believe the U.S. is missing an opportunity to peel Damascus away from its alliance with Iran. And Rice's relationship with Abbas, in particular...
...were depressed as hell as we were doing this work," admits Kenneth Pollack, a co-author of the report. "It was not a fun project." Nearly all past attempts by outsiders to suppress civil wars have failed. The ones that succeeded - Bosnia, for example - required a ratio of 20 armed peacekeepers per 1,000 locals. In Iraq that would mean an international security force of about 450,000 troops, and that's excluding Kurdistan, which hopefully would remain stable...
...White House to start "thinking about how to deal with the consequences of massive failure in Iraq," which would carry a heavy price for the United States and its allies. The report estimates that some 450,000 peacekeeping troops would have to be deployed to end an all-out civil war in Iraq and prevent the turmoil from spilling its borders...
...President Bush has said "failure is not an option in Iraq," but the Brookings researchers warn that he may already have failed there and not know it. They scoured the records of more than a dozen nations wracked by all-out civil war during the past 30 years - countries such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Somalia - and found that while historians could agree with hindsight on when those conflicts reached the point of no return, that point was never apparent to the leaders at the time. "This should sober us to the possibility that it may already be too late...
...consequences of a full-scale civil war will not only be hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying, but also the strategic problem of "spillover." Based on their review of spillover patterns from past civil wars, Brookings' researchers believe Iraq's collapse would result in refugees streaming into neighboring countries, creating an economic burden. Embittered refugees would become "a ready recruiting pool for armed groups still waging the civil war." As al-Qaeda did in Afghanistan, terror groups would establish enclaves in Iraq. Neighboring populations could become radicalized and side with ethnic and religious factions fighting inside Iraq, as Albanians were...