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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (113671)	9/1/2003 11:19:07 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

My sense is that there are several groups doing the fighting, independently of each other. Hard to say exactly but the major hits all seem to be Al Qaeda - the Jordanian Embassy, the UN compound, the Ali Mosque. The reports from the ground seem to be that you have Ba'athist remnants in the Sunni triangle, not very well organized - each strike seems organized in itself but I haven't seen anybody call the strikes well organized between each other - and jihadists of various stripes everywhere else. The Baghdadis seem to be reporting that the guerillas are foreigners. There have been zero reports of organized Kurdish or Shi'a attacks. The threat of Balkanizing Iraq was one of the primary reasons I thought doing this war was stupid from the beginning. I haven't seen much so far to make me think otherwise. Well, so far the Iraqis are not fighting each other, and this is a good thing. Besides which, Iraq is never going to 'Balkanize' because it is not divided into lots of little pieces the way the Balkans are. It is divided into three big pieces, roughly following the Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Personally, I fail to see what would be so terrible about these three pieces joining in a loose federation or splitting altogher. Unless you are a Sunni Iraqi, that is, the part that no longer gets to be boss and is not sitting on any oil fields. But it has implications beyond Iraq itself, implications for Syria, Iran and especially Turkey ( You forgot the country which has the weakest government and the most direct implications - Saudi Arabia. A prosperous Shi'a entity would be one hell of lure to their Eastern Province.