US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts

The Brooks Institution have advised the US government to prepare "to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran."

This startling conclusion is based on the assumption that Bush's latest "surge and accelerate" plan will fail and the further assumption that Washington will not be able to simply walk away from any chaos that Iraq descends into.

Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.

It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 "surge" ordered by President Bush this month.

As civil war in Iraq gathers pace the likelihood of war between the US and Iran would intensify as Iran would be seen as "the unambiguous adversary" of the US.

Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.

Nonetheless, the Brookings report urges the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war. That would see exactly the contacts with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration steadfastly refuses. An alternative in the report would be "red lines" which, if crossed by Tehran, could lead to a military attack by the US on Iran.

The Brookings report will be ignored exactly as the Baker report was ignored. The blind ideologues currently running US policy have ignored every sensible piece of advice they have ever been given. If there was ever a time for the US to reach out to Iran and Syria it is now.

Ignoring this advice will only heighten the chance of a war between Iran and the US, an outcome that might be welcomed by the likes of Bill Kristol, but can only fill the rest of us with horror.

I watched an astonishing Despatches programme last night called "Iraq's death squads" which told the story of how Shia gangs are carrying out ethnic cleansing and being protected as they do so by the Iraqi government which needs their support in order to survive.

The violence being carried out against the Sunnis is horrific. As the Washington Post reported:

Reports last week in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times chronicled how Iraqi Interior Ministry commando and police units have been infiltrated by two Shiite militias, which have been conducting ethnic cleansing and rounding up Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Hundreds of bodies have been appearing along roadsides and in garbage dumps, some with acid burns or with holes drilled in them. According to the searing account by Solomon Moore of the Los Angeles Times, "the Baghdad morgue reports that dozens of bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses with wrists bound by police handcuffs." The reports followed a raid two weeks ago by U.S. troops on a clandestine Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, where some 170 men, most of them Sunni and most of them starved or tortured, were found.

The danger this development poses to Iraq, and to the prospects of a successful end to the U.S. mission there, ought to be obvious. A dirty war conducted by the Iraqi government against one ethnic group will make civil war inevitable. It will render impossible a political accord among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, while increasing the likelihood that Iraq will splinter. U.S. commanders will be unable to hand responsibility off to Iraqi forces without inviting a bloodbath, and the training mission that President Bush described at length in his speech on Wednesday will be utterly discredited. If there is to be any chance of achieving Mr. Bush's goals of a united and democratic Iraq that protects the rights of its minorities, the state-sponsored death squads and torture chambers must be dismantled.

Civil war in Iraq is upon us, with the Bush regime - in effect - arming and backing one side in the dispute.

I have argued previously that only a negotiated settlement can have any chance of success. The current course, where the US backs the Shias as they eliminate their Sunni rivals is simply stoking the fire of the civil war.

I also accept that the task of bringing about a negotiated settlement is a huge one and would require the US talking to groups that it has previously been fighting against, either literally (in the case of Sunni fighters) or politically (in the case of Iran).

The neo-con mindset prevalent in Washington is insisting that a military solution is possible. This is nonsense. Iraq is fractured and on the brink of splitting into it's ethnic elements.

Only dialogue can bring us back from this abyss. Sadly, the current US leadership are refusing to countenance walking any such sensible path and the chances of regional escalation are multiplying.

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tag: Iraq war, Iran, regional escalation, civil war