Noted without comment, part one

As reported by UPI:

Fears of a civil war in Iraq are mounting as a growing number of killings are attributed to sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. ...

We are drifting into a sectarian society, said Ghassan al-Atiyya, a secular Shiite and the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy. The Americans ... let the genie out of the bottle.

Sunni statesman and former Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi, who returned to Baghdad from exile in 2003, also bemoaned the strain church and state relations had created.

I came back to Iraq with the assumption that these religious and sectarian tendencies were not that strong, Pachachi said. But in times of trouble, people tend to go toward religion and the religious parties make use of that very skillfully.

The UPI report was drawn from a story in the New York Times.