The Guardian : On the road to the Rubicon

[tocqueville]

.........................

For the insurgents, the destruction of the Askari mosque has served its purpose: it makes it harder for the Shia prime minister, Ibrahim al-Ja'afari, to construct a government which includes Sunni politicians, as the US and Britain have been urging him to do. Without such a government, a split on the ethnic and sectarian lines that emerged from the December election seems inevitable. But the term "civil war", chillingly familiar from Lebanon in the 1970s or Algeria in the 1990s, is too neat: Iraq is embroiled in a war of all against all, supercharged mayhem in which Shia militias fight each other; the Kurds have a fully-fledged army; al-Qaida and foreign jihadis work with Ba'athists and armed criminals run rackets. The road ahead leads to warlordism and anarchy.

US troops continue to kill and be killed, but like the far smaller British forces spend as much time defending themselves as fighting or helping Iraqis. British army morale has plummeted amid resentment of a culture of dependency by the Iraqi police and security forces. Still, training continues and the US-UK presence includes an element of restraint, of holding the ring that sudden withdrawal would remove: the scandal of Shia militiamen torturing Sunni prisoners in Baghdad was unearthed by the US. In cities like Mosul the police would be thrown out in days and ethnic cleansing would follow if American troops left. If there is to be an Iraqi government with any capacity for governing, it needs both cajoling and supporting. That is the reality behind rhetoric about not cutting and running before "the job is done".

Set against that is the argument that the occupation is a powerful magnet for extremists, as well as both a unifying force and raison d'etre for the insurgency. End the occupation, or least set out a strategy and timetable for ending it with Iraqi oversight, as this paper has advocated, and the men with guns will give way to politicians seeking a post-Saddam accommodation. Plans for UN-mandated peacekeepers from Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Turkey could be revived. If Iraq collapses into a vortex of violence, there will be urgent new calls for foreign intervention to save lives.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1716843,00.html

[yurbud]

1. would Sunnis gain ANYTHING from civil war since they are minority

in non-oil producing region.

As likely as any other outcome is the partion of Iraq into a separate ethnic countries, which would ace Sunnis out of the oil money all together.

So what do they get by inciting civil war?

[Selatius]

2. We don't have sufficient evidence to say the Sunnis bombed that mosque

If anything, bombing that particular mosque would hurt them more than help. It is most likely foreign, outside elements that did this in order to provoke ethnic cleansing/civil war. Several elements would benefit from provoking such a disaster, and none of them have ordinary people's interests in mind.

[yurbud]

3. probably the foreign elements that speak English...

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Juan Cole thinks they would be quite powerful in a civil war

From an interesting recent interview with him:

The Sunni Arabs can punch above their weight. People assume because they are 20-some percent of the population then they could easily be overwhelmed by the others. But they were the equivalent of the Harvard MBAs, the West Point graduates, the hardened war veterans; they are the ones who know tactics, military strategy. If Americans just up and left altogether, I think the Sunni Arabs would take the new government out and shoot it, and wrest the few tanks that were left in the country away from the government and use them against it.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=8917

He's no all-knowing guru, of course, but his opinions are better than most writers on the Middle East, I think. The Sunnis are the most likely to know where all the missing armaments that weren't guarded at the end of the invasion.