Word: conflicting
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...fear is of an escalation of the current insurgency into a much bigger war. Analysts may have in mind something like the U.S. Civil War, with Sunni and Shi'ite armies fighting each other across well-defined fronts. Or they may imagine a sudden spasm of massive communal conflict and ethnic cleansing along the lines of Bosnia or Rwanda. Neither scenario is all that likely, although bouts of violent ethnic cleansing are certainly possible in a few parts of the country, especially Kirkuk...
...remain highly disorganized, some of these local fights may initially be intra-Shi'ite. But in the absence of effective political incorporation and protection from national police and army units--which are heavily infiltrated by Shi'ite militias--Sunnis will gradually form a patchwork of militias. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood conflict and violence will increase. Think Lebanon...
...outbreak of communal conflict has raised the nightmarish prospect of an even wider and more destabilizing war that would tempt the country's neighbors to intervene on behalf of the partisans. And the violence threatens to spoil the overriding U.S. objective in Iraq: brokering the formation of a broadly representative government, which the Bush Administration has hoped would defuse the Sunni-led insurgency and facilitate a substantial withdrawal of U.S. troops. To protest the other side's excesses, Sunni and Shi'ite leaders have both walked away from U.S.-led negotiations on the new government...
Given the failure to head off last week's conflagration, U.S. hopes of averting an ignominious defeat in Iraq now hinge on whether it can bring the fighting to an end. The biggest fear is that the breakdown of order could draw neighboring countries into the conflict, with Iran intervening on behalf of the Shi'ites and Arab states supporting the Sunnis. Some U.S. military officers say privately that the turmoil has vindicated their insistence that it's premature to turn over security duties to the Iraqis. "This week's events support our caution and unwillingness to pull out troops...
When Summers announced early on that he wanted to remake the undergraduate curriculum to ensure that Harvard graduates knew more, especially about science, he set off a direct conflict with the faculty, whose incentive is to spend as little time as possible designing and teaching undergraduate courses. Summers then made his goal harder to achieve by picking fights with faculty members, making disparaging remarks about entire categories of academics (such as women in science) and, probably most important, vetoing tenure cases that had been elaborately assembled by individual departments. It looks as if the collapse of his curriculum-reform effort...