What we activated when we took out Saddam

Making the world a much more dangerous place:

Since coming to power last May, Maliki has failed on security, he has failed on political co-existence, and he has failed on refugees.
This brings into question his leadership - something touched on in the United States' National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which was released in part on February 2. The 90-page document, much anticipated in the intelligence community, sheds serious doubt on whether the Iraqi leadership can overcome sectarian violence, even with an additional 21,500 US troops sent in by the US president to help Maliki. One section of the report reads: "Even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate."

The report adds that the violence is made in Iraq, and not exported from Syria and Iran as President George W Bush has been saying since 2003.

The NIE adds that the Iraqi security forces would be "unlikely to survive as a non-sectarian national institution", and said that a good outcome depended on a "stronger Iraqi leadership". "The absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunnis or Shi'ites with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects for reconciliation."

The parts of the NIE that Maliki should read relate to the outcomes. It says that while all is not lost, and some factors could help stabilize Iraq, many destabilizing factors could easily plunge the country into more chaos. The report mentions "sustained mass sectarian killing, assassination of major religious and political leaders and a complete Sunni defection from the government". Any one of these has "the potential to convulse severely Iraq's security environment".

Tragically, any one of these is all too possible in the shambles that Iraq has become.