Iraq Is Coming Apart at the Seams

Iraq is splintering along a dozen fault lines, and the prospects for a political solution are slim. Experts in conflict negotiation -- veterans of civil strife in places like Northern Ireland and Cambodia -- talk about the need for a clash to "ripen," to come to a point when combatants are exhausted with the violence and see that whatever they might gain from continued fighting is outweighed by the costs. Before they get to that place, a political settlement is all but impossible.

Iraq's armed factions, sadly, aren't close to that point. The stakes are too high -- Shiites are fighting for the majority rule that has long eluded them, Sunnis are fighting to hang on to some political influence and retain a piece of the country's oil wealth and the Kurds are fighting for some degree of independence. Iraqis are fighting against occupation by foreign troops, and they're fighting to keep their country together. Neither government troops nor coalition forces have been able to protect civilians; they're being cut down by death squads and plagued by rampant criminality. Iraqis are battling for their homes and for their lives.

This week saw the first signs of open civil war, as Shiite and Sunni militias battled it out in Balad, a city north of Baghdad, as well as a sharp spike in violence in the Iraqi capital. In the south, Shiites battled Shiites in Amarah, while Sunni militias held military parades in Haqlaniyah and Haditha. There are at least 23 independent militias operating in Baghdad alone.

It's hard to imagine what policy makers here or in Iraq can do to change the risk-benefit calculations to a degree that would lead dozens of armed factions to lay down their weapons and trust their futures to a political process. In Washington, those tasked with trying to come up with the right policy are hobbled by a stunning degree of ignorance about the region -- essentially viewing the Middle East as roiled in a conflict between "good" and "bad" Arabs. The New York Times' Jeff Stein found that most policy makers overseeing the U.S. effort don't even know which countries in the region -- or which armed groups in Iraq -- have Shiite or Sunni majorities.

Today the government elected last December is hanging by a thread. Iraqi lawmakers reached by phone earlier this week reported that Baghdad is awash in rumors of an impending coup. There's widespread anticipation that a "government of national salvation" -- a junta -- will seize power and dissolve Iraq's Parliament at any time. Those rumors are being echoed in Washington.

The most commonly discussed scenario is of a council of four or five influential leaders headed either by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi -- a secular, pro-American Shiite with a violent background -- or Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the Sunni National Dialogue Front and a former constitutional negotiator, taking power in a bloodless coup.

Mutlaq was visiting neighboring capitals this week, reportedly to gain support for the plan. According to the Washington Post, he spent this summer pushing the idea in meetings across the Middle East. He's been promising American support for the coup.

The official line is that the U.S. opposes any action against Iraq's democratically elected government. But if the coup comes to pass, it will be with some level of American approval -- the Iraqi government is entirely within the U.S.-controlled and heavily defended Green zone. "The [coup] scenario is not a bad scenario for the United States," Robert Killebrew, a retired Army colonel and national security analyst told the Washington Times. "U.S. policy issues in the Middle East and Iraq do not require a democratic Iraq, it only requires a stable and friendly Iraq," he said. Killebrew predicted that there'd be "a certain amount of sanctimonious hand-wringing and saying that we don't agree with the overthrow of a democratically elected government," after which the administration would reluctantly voice its support for the new regime.