Regional Disaster

It's funny, in a not amusing way, how immediately after the election, the drumbeat begins to change tempo in the media. Now after all the cheerleading for giving up and withdrawing in failure from Iraq, the media notices that it would be a disaster not for George Bush alone, but for the United States and for the entire world. A few articles like the one in the Washington Post today would have at least presented that scenario. But the media did its level best (successfully) to drag the Democrats across the finish line.

Now they have to set about undoing some of the damage they wreaked in the process.

"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.

As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars — no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq a battleground for the region.

Obaid described widespread interference by Iranian security forces within Iraq. He urged Saudi Arabia, which is building a 560-mile wall on its border with Iraq, to warn Iran "that if these activities are not checked," Saudi Arabia "will be forced to consider a similar overt and covert program of its own."

In Damascus, a Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warned that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full-scale civil war. "Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved, Saudi Arabia, Syria," said the analyst, who spoke on condition he not be identified further.

"Regional war is very much a possibility," said Hiltermann, the analyst for the International Crisis Group. Iraq's neighbors "are hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region," he said.

Which is, of course, what a lot of people have been trying to get across for quite some time now. This is not just a disaster for the president. It is a disaster for every country in that region. It is time and past time to get them to face up to that and actually do something other than cheer for Washington to fail. Or the war will come to them instead of being on the other side of the border. The reality is that Iran under Ahmadinejad is attempting to reforge an empire and the other countries in the region better stand against that while they still can. Or accept a role as a province in the new Persian Empire.