From The Washington Post, 11/16/06:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/15/AR2006111501490.html
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page A01
BAGHDAD --
While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in
Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around
the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry
ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and
draw in surrounding countries.
Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United
States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not
threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and Arab
analysts and political observers.
"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a
failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing
into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director
for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman,
Jordan.
"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.
"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the
disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to
the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on
U.S.-Arab relations.
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Trapped in a civil war
2,865 American troops are dead, 21,680 have been wounded, over 650,000
innocent Iraqis are dead and wounded.
Harry
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