The course of a catastrophe

"My view is that (U.S. ambassador Zalmay) Khalilzad has been spun for an absolute sucker by [Iraqi Kurdish leader] Talabani and the Iranians." - Helana Cobban

Jim Lobe gives us some of the newest signposts on the road leading from Iraqi insurgency to Iraqi civil war to regional war, including Helena Cobban's take on things: US Efforts to Oust Jaafari May Backfire Inter Press Service 04/07/06

Robert Dreyfuss on what we can realistically expect in Iraq if things keep going the way they have been:

To understand what Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1990, a brutal struggle that left perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller country. That war dragged on for fifteen years, during which Lebanon's many-sided political culture constantly realigned itself like a reshaken kaleidoscope. ...

... Through it all, Lebanon maintained the fiction that it had a central government, held elections, and even regularly staffed embassies abroad. On the ground, however, power was with the various militias, and the toll in human life was crushing. ...

That is precisely what the civil war in Iraq is beginning to look like today. Baghdad, like Beirut, is fast being transformed into a carcass to be fought over (as are cities like Kirkuk and Mosul). The Kurdish north, the Shiite south, and the Sunni triangle are becoming fortified hinterlands for the struggle to control Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk. Iraq has become a Mad Max world in which angry youths wheel around in jeeps and pickups, don ragtag militia uniforms, and set up checkpoints and roadblocks guns drawn. The Shiite forces eye each other suspiciously and enviously, and their rivalries may yet turn to open warfare and violence. The two big Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, despise each other, and in the past have warred each against the other. The Sunnis too are thoroughly divided. Any of these factions might ally with just about any of the others, then break that alliance only to ally for a period with a former enemy and attack the former ally. There are no rules, only guns. Is it possible to imagine the U.S. armed forces in the midst of this chaos? No.

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