WASHINGTON
TWO days of mob violence last week after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine did not simply aggravate Iraq's sectarian hatreds. Like a near-death experience, the carnage seems to have shocked Sunni and Shiite leaders into a new realization of what civil war would cost, and new efforts to avoid it.
But what happens if such efforts — and frantic ones by Americans — prove incapable of stopping an all-out war?
What if, as Abraham Lincoln famously said of America's greatest ordeal: "All dreaded it, all sought to avert it ... And the war came."
The greatest fear of leaders throughout the Middle East is that an unrestrained civil war, if it ever comes to that, would not only give birth to warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves inside Iraq, but that the violence could also spread unpredictably through the region.
Some experts have advocated a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three main sectors for the main ethnic and religious groupings. But a violent crackup could not easily be kept stable.
It might well incite sectarian conflicts in neighboring countries and, even worse, draw these countries into taking sides in Iraq itself. Iran would side with the Shiites. It is already allied with the biggest Shiite militias, some of whose members seemed to be involved in the retaliatory attacks on Sunnis after the Shiite shrine bombing last week.
And Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait would feel a need to defend Sunnis or perhaps to create buffer states for themselves along Iraq's borders. Turkey might also feel compelled to move in, to protect Iraq's Turkoman minority against a Kurdish state in the north.
If Iraq were to sink deeper into that kind of conflict, Baghdad and other cities could become caldrons of ethnic cleansing, bringing revenge violence from one region to another. Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia, where Shiites happen to live in the oil-rich eastern sector, could easily revolt. Such a regional conflict could take years to exhaust itself, and could force the redrawing of boundaries that themselves are less than 100 years old.
"A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario."
A first question for the United States if a general collapse of order seemed to be in the offing would be what to do with its 130,000 troops in Iraq.
"We would probably have to get out of the way," said Larry Diamond, who advised the American occupation in Baghdad in 2004 and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "We wouldn't have nearly enough troops to quell the violence at that point. At a minimum, we'd have to pull back to certain military bases and try to keep working the politics."
Modern civil wars have been resolved by negotiations, but only after they were deepened by the intervention of outsiders. Internal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990's led to intervention by troops from Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The Balkan wars erupted after the breakup of Yugoslavia earlier in that decade, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo. The power-sharing arrangements that were worked out remain precarious, backed up by NATO troops.
In events closer to Iraq, more than 15 years of civil war in Lebanon ended when Syrian troops took on the role of reinforcing a peculiar arrangement that distributes certain high offices among the country's sectarian groups. Even the West at first welcomed the Syrians as a stabilizing factor — until last year, when they withdrew under European and American pressure.
BUT Iraq poses a threat that dwarfs these problems. The pivot of what could become a regional conflict is almost certainly Iran. Shiite leaders close to Iran won the Iraqi election in December, and although American and many Iraqi leaders defend their Iraqi nationalist bona fides, a civil war would almost certainly drive them to seek help from Iran. That stirs Sunni Arab fears of Iranian dominance in the region.
