Looking for Baby Bear

To paraphrase the famous quote, a spectre is stalking Iraq - the spectre of civil war. From the LA Times news service, September 2, via Information Clearinghouse:

Iraq will be lucky if it manages to avoid a breakup and civil war, and the country can become the spark for a vortex of regional upheaval, a report released yesterday by Britain's highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs has concluded.

In a bleak assessment of where Iraq stands nearly 18 months after the launch of the U.S.-led war to depose former President Saddam Hussein, the institute's Middle East team focused on the internal forces dividing the country and the danger that external pressures could make the tendency even worse. ...

At most, the report suggested, the United States and its allies can hope for a "muddle through" scenario, holding the country together but falling short of their original goal: creation of a full-fledged democracy friendly to the West. ...

The fragmentation of Iraq is the "default" scenario, the report said, and would occur if U.S.-led forces were to pull out of the country too quickly or if the U.S. government were to impose its vision on the country too rigidly.

That is, unless everything is done just right - not too hard, not too soft, not too fast, not too slow - disaster will follow. Where's Goldilocks when we need her?

Of course, that there is a threat of a breakup of Iraq into a three-way ethnic-based civil war along the lines the Royal Institute is suggesting, a threat actually created by our invasion, is something I've been saying for some months now, but what do I know? I'm just a low-traffic blogger.

And frankly, I say their notion that we can "muddle though" to a stable Iraq is impossibly optimistic. I say there are only two possible outcomes: chaos or the imposition of a reign every bit as brutal and corrupt as Saddam's, indeed more so since the forces now unleashed are even stronger than those he overcame and suppressed. With Allawi we have moved in that direction. But that will not prevent the bloodshed or even end it.

I've said it before, I will say it again: Getting out, or "cutting and running" in the pejorative formation, willl not stop the violence. But the violence will not stop until we get out. STDD>HO.