EXCLUSIVE: Report sees recipe for civil war in Iraq

From The Washington Times.

A report to be published this month by the U.S. government's prestigious National Defense University warns that the Iraqi army and police are becoming pawns of sectarian political parties -- a trend that it calls "a recipe for civil war." The report by Najim Abed al-Jabouri, a former Iraqi mayor and police chief who helped run the first successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, also concludes that U.S. forces have failed to use their remaining leverage as trainers to insulate the Iraqi army and police from the influence of powerful Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim and Kurdish parties.

This article is very interesting in that it accurately portrays many dynamics currently ongoing in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces are for the most part nonsectarian and generally do operations which are nonsectarian, especially the Iraqi Army. However, there are loyalties to political parties which occassionally swing operations for purposes of different political parties. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next year as US Forces withdraw from Iraq.

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