Word: shiing
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...just sectarian slaughter but outright anarchy as well. "Our immediate concern," says a senior Arab diplomat, "is that sending a signal of complete withdrawal could encourage some elements in every faction in every political group that they can now impose their own agenda. It would be not only Shi'ite versus Sunni ... but [war] inside each community itself. The worst case is a Somalia-ization of Iraq...
...worst-case scenario is an Iraq war that becomes a regional conflict. Sunni sympathizers in the region - most notably in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria - would funnel arms and cash to their kinsmen in Iraq to counter the Shi'ites, just as the government of Iran is quietly helping the Shi'ites themselves. "One of the things we've seen elsewhere, whether it is Ireland or Palestine," says Jon Alterman, Middle East director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "is that when you have people outside the country that are doing the paying, you will continue to have...
...easy to see how a reckless U.S. departure could spark a chain reaction that leads to further destabilization or even war among Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, three of the world's 15 top oil-exporting countries. Shi'ites who object to Saudi backing of the Sunnis might retaliate inside the kingdom - or Sunnis might take the fight into Iran. "We will have sectarian violence on a level that would likely trigger regional war," says Michèle Flournoy, president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan think tank. "At that point, you are looking...
...Given that the current U.S. force has been unable to curb sectarian killings, it's unreasonable to expect that a reduced U.S. troop presence would stop Sunnis and Shi'ites from killing one another. But even with a significantly smaller footprint, the U.S. would retain sufficient firepower on the ground and in the skies to guard against others trying to intervene. After a majority of U.S. troops depart, a military presence of some size will still be needed - not so much to referee a civil war, as U.S. forces are doing now, but to try to keep it from expanding...
...Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the U.S. military estimates that al-Qaeda in Iraq - a group thought to number several thousand - accounts for only about 15% of the attacks in Iraq. (Other Sunni groups account for 70%, with Shi'ite militias responsible for the remaining 15%.) But, Cordesman says, those attacks are the most deadly and "probably do the most damage in pushing Iraq toward civil war." At the moment, al-Qaeda in Iraq is valuable to Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, even though the links...