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When
it comes to ominous warnings about the future of
Iraq, none have been more dire than those coming
from Prince Saud al-Faisal. He is Saudi Arabia's
foreign minister and the first Arab leader to have
spoken out in public about Iraq in such pessimistic
terms in recent months.
Prince Saud said last week that he has been warning
the Bush administration that Iraq was heading
rapidly toward disintegration. He can foresee a
fracturing of that unstable country into three
hostile factions of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds - a
prelude to an uncontrollable civil war that could
destabilize the Persian Gulf and other parts of the
Middle East, with incalculable consequences.
If what he envisions were to come true, U.S. troops
would not be able to maintain control and would be
pulled out; the Shia government, facing defeat by
Sunni insurgents, would ask the Shia clerics ruling
Iran for help and Iranian troops would cross the
border to fight Sunnis; Kurds would pull away into
an independent state and Turkey, fearing its own
Kurdish guerrillas would find a safe haven, would
invade Kurdistan.
To be sure, what Prince Saud is outlining is a
worst-case scenario that would lead to lethal chaos
across the region and jack up oil prices instantly
and steeply. Though such an outcome is distressingly
plausible, his warnings should be taken at least
with a degree of skepticism. They reflect Saudi
Arabia's perennial obsession with maintaining
stability in the Persian Gulf and are skewed toward
the Saudi regime's overriding concern for its own
political survival in the face of the rising
Islamist challenge to its legitimacy - and the
equally unsettling fear that Iran could create a
Shia hegemony in the region.
It's a scenario that can still be avoided, but it
will take strong and convincing efforts by the Bush
administration to ensure Sunni participation in the
upcoming referendum on Iraq's constitution and, more
important, to assure Sunnis that they will be given
a substantive role in Iraq's government. Such
efforts, however, have proved distressingly
inadequate so far.
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