Another Vision of Iraq

Were Iraq to descend into civil war, there is no way to say in advance how such a war would be resolved. Who would control Iraq once the fighting was over? Would ethnic cleansing drain Iraq of the minority Sunni? Would there even be one Iraqi state? Of course, despite the bombing and ensuing violence this past week, it's still impossible to say with certainty that Iraq is doomed to civil war. Instead it's possible that instead of civil war, Iraq could slowly fracture along sectarian lines as a result of uneding but relatively but low grade violence, and would gradually take on the image of a failed state:

The outlines of a future Iraq are emerging: a nation where power is scattered among clerics turned warlords; control over schools, hospitals, railroads and roads is divided along sectarian lines; graft and corruption subvert good governance; and foreign powers exert influence only over a weak central government.

Doomsayers long have warned that Iraq was turning into a failed state like Somalia or Taliban-run Afghanistan, a regional black hole. It's far too early to write Iraq off as a quagmire, analysts say, but the threat of contagious and continuous instability — like in Lebanon — looms.

"All of this is creating great, great decentralization and a failure to provide services," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank. "Until they get a real central government, they're not going to provide any effective central authority. This is going to require some time — a long time."

"The expectations of the United States and its allies have been lowered considerably," said Mark Sedra, a researcher specializing in rebuilding post-conflict countries at the Bonn International Center for Conversion, a German think tank. "Now the main goal is just creating a state that controls instability and contains the high levels of violence that prevail at the moment and prevents that violence from spilling over into neighboring states or destabilizing the region."

Unfortunately, a failed Iraqi state is a much, much greater danger to U.S. interests than Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia or Lebanon ever were. Afghanistan, though home to the Taliban and a shelter for Al Qaeda, is relatively isolated from influencing American interests, as is Lebanon. Similarly, Somalia and Bosnia had no substantial effect on American interests until we chose to intervene in both. But Iraq is a different story. As discussed previously, an unstable Iraq could prompt unwanted intervention by numerous states in the region, split other countries among sectarian lines, and provide a base to terrorists hostile to the U.S. An Iraq that becomes a failed state is hardly any better than an Iraq that's embroiled in civil war; in some respects it may be worse, as at the end of a civil war it's least possible that a government that is not entirely hostile to the U.S. could emerge, and that government could be powerful and secure enough to rebuild a semblance of Iraq. But an Iraq that slowly dissolves might require decades to rebuild, decades during which we might have little or no influence on the outcome, and no one knows what could be left in the end.