The Gates Have Opened, Hell Is Here

The horrific black hole of spiraling violence and hate known as Iraq has careened out of anyone's ability to stop or lessen, and the carnage looks likely to increase by an order of magnitude

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Sectarian Strife in Iraq Imperils Entire Region, Analysts Warn

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to U.S. and Arab analysts and political observers.

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

Here's an even cheerier thought, what if the other countries in the region are destabilized as badly as Iraq is now?

What happens if, in all Iraq's neighboring countries, you get Iraq style roving death squads, which answer only to their individual cells, and ignore all political, social, religious or military groups or individuals?

Well, one thing that's more than likely to occur

All that oil in the middle east stops flowing to the west, as no group would be strong enough to ensure oil production and shipping from all the attacks sure to occur by the various warring factions

One of the worst ideas masquerading as a solution would be to break Iraq apart into a tripartite state, as the forced evacuations called "ethnic cleansing" are the perfect complements for the ever-more rapacious Death Squads tormenting Iraqis

"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."

Basically, picture the carnage in Iraq taking place in every other country in the region, and the word "Hellish" is too delicate an understatement adequately describe the violence

This conflict long ago spiraled out of President Bush Jr's direct ability to control, and it only shows signs of widening, not stopping or even slowing down in the least

And now ethnic cleansing is occuring in a place this President assured us would become more stable without it's brutal tyrant, a despot the US backed financially and militarily for decades

The most shameful chapter of Clinton's presidency was a failure to address the Genocide in Rwanda

President Bush Jr's clearly incompetent leadership is in being the prime cause for all the violence going on in Iraq-none of which would have occured if the US had not invaded Iraq in the first place

Since midsummer, Shiite militias, Sunni insurgent groups, ad-hoc Sunni self-defense groups and tribes have accelerated campaigns of sectarian cleansing that are forcing countless thousands of Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad to seek safety among their own kind.

Whole towns north and south of Baghdad are locked in the same sectarian struggle, among them the central Shiite city of Balad, still under siege by gunmen from surrounding Sunni towns after a bloody spate of sectarian massacres last month.

Even outside the epicenter of sectarian strife in the central region of the country, Shiite factions battle each other in the south, Sunni tribes and factions clash in the west. Across Iraq, the criminal gangs that emerged with the collapse of law and order rule patches of turf as mini-warlords.

Imagine total anarchy all over the middle east, with no government strong enough to bring a halt to fighting in it's own borders, that's where it looks like the Iraq conflict is increasingly headed, to every other state in the region

And imagine the refugee crisis in the entire middle east as people are forced to flee from the fighting, and if Iraq's the indicator, these appalling numbers will only become mind-numbing when spread across the region

Since the war began, 1.6 million Iraqis have sought refuge in neighboring countries; at least 231,530 people have been displaced inside Iraq since February, when Shiite-Sunni violence exploded with the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra, according to figures from the United Nations and the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration.

And the hatred being reaped goes so, so deep into minds and souls, even of the youngest of children

Letters placed at the doors of Sunni families -- sometimes with bloody bullets tucked inside the envelopes -- warned Sunnis to leave. Shiite boys as young as 10 took to wearing the black clothes of the militias, and they promised her 10-year-old son, Ahmed, they would burn him alive in his house at night as he slept.

If this type of all-encompassing hatred slips past Iraq into it's neighbors, the bloodbath will be like nothing seen since World War II, and it would seem safe to think that sudden, violent flare-ups will occur in other countries outside the middle east, with groups and individuals taking the region wide violence as a call to action