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

To: bentway who wrote (192665)	7/22/2006 8:55:04 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

Beirut in Beirut and Beirut in Baghdad. What a mess these idiots make of everything. "Mission accomplished" in reverse The Bush administration has long insisted that news stories about violence in Iraq obscure the progress that is being made on the political front. Perhaps it's time to put that story to rest. In an extraordinarily gloomy report from Baghdad, Reuters correspondent Mariam Karouny says that Iraqi leaders have "all but given up on holding the country together." Among the ideas now on the table: Divide Baghdad into two zones, one for Shiites and one for Sunnis, in the hopes of stopping the bloodshed between the two. The harsh words from one unnamed government official: "Iraq as a political project is finished." -- Tim Grieve War Room, Salon.com today.reuters.co.uk Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters. Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.... "The situation is terrifying and black," said Rida Jawad al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki's dominant Shi'ite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue. "We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation," he said. As sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes, a senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: "Everyone knows the situation is very bad," he said. "I'm not optimistic." RESIGNED TO INEVITABLE? Some Western diplomats in Baghdad say there is little sign the new government is capable of halting a slide to civil war. "Maliki and some others seem to be genuinely trying to make this work," one said. "But it doesn't look like they have real support. The factions are looking out for their own interests." The presence of 140,000 heavily armed foreign troops, most of them Americans, is keeping a lid on open grabs for territory by armed groups from various communities. But few see Washington willing to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely and many analysts question the new, U.S.-trained Iraqi army's cohesion. Broadly speaking Iraq could split in three: a Shi'ite south, Kurdish north and Sunni Arab west. But there could be fierce fighting between Arabs and Kurds for Mosul and for Kirkuk's oil as well as urban war in Baghdad, resembling Beirut in the 1970s. Officials say the Tigris river is already looking like the Beirut "Green Line", dividing Sunni west Baghdad, known by its ancient name of Karkh, from the mainly Shi'ite east, or Rusafa. ...