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Common Dreams bericht: 'Fuse Lit for Total War in Mideast: U.S. EnvoyWarns against pulling troops out of Iraq too soon Country `really vulnerable' to an all-out civil war. BAGHDAD - The toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 opened a "Pandora's box" of ethnic and sectarian tensions that could engulf the region in all-out war and disrupt the global economy if U.S. forces were to leave the country too soon, says the top American diplomat in Iraq. In remarks that were among the frankest and bleakest public assessments of the situation by a high-level American official, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the "potential is there" for sectarian violence to become all-out civil war, but that Iraq for now had pulled back from that prospect after the wave of sectarian reprisals for the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. "If another incident (occurs), Iraq is really vulnerable to it at this time," Khalilzad said in an interview. Abandoning Iraq in the way the U.S. disengaged from civil wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Somalia could have dramatic global repercussions, he said. "We have opened the Pandora's Box and the question is, what is the way forward? The way forward, in my view, is an effort to build bridges across these communities."
Khalilzad's comments came as Britain's most senior officer in Iraq said his country plans to pull out nearly all its soldiers from Iraq by the summer of 2008, with the first withdrawals within weeks. Lieut.-Gen. Nick Houghton, outlined a phased two-year withdrawal plan in an interview published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Britain, America's biggest partner in the Iraq campaign, has 8,000 troops in Iraq, based in and around the southern port of Basra.
U.S. military officials must decide this month whether to cancel scheduled deployments of several army combat brigades — a decision that would lead to a reduction in the total number of U.S. troops by mid-year from about 130,000 to about 100,000. On Sunday, U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a televised interview that things in Iraq are "going very, very well, from everything you look at."' Lees verder:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0308-08.htm