Historians Offer Dismal Iraq Forecast

A man checks debris after a car bomb parked opposite to a restaurant exploded in eastern Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Jan. 21, 2007. Six people were wounded in the blast. (AP Photo/Samir Mizban) (Samir Mizban - AP)

-- To historians and others pondering Iraq, forecasting a final outcome for that sad land is like finding your way through one of its "shamal" sandstorms. You may not know where you're headed, but you know it's going to be dark.

The Middle East historian David Fromkin sees a breakup of the jerry-built nation. Phebe Marr, doyenne of Iraq scholars, sees "distrust and suspicion" too deep to overcome. "Bleak," concludes Baghdad University's Saad al-Hadithi.

"At the moment," said the British historian Niall Ferguson, "a happy ending has a 1-in-100 look about it."

In interviews with The Associated Press, few experts see much chance that President Bush's plan to add 21,500 troops to the U.S. force in Baghdad and western Iraq will suppress either the anti-U.S. insurgency or the bloody underground warfare between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or induce a political settlement among the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions.

The Senate this week is expected to begin action on a nonbinding resolution repudiating the Bush troop buildup. The measure was introduced by the Democratic-majority but has attracted some Republican support.

Mohamed el-Sayed Said, of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said he expects the growing U.S. political opposition to the war will lead at some point to a redeployment of American troops to northern Iraq's Kurdistan and to elsewhere in the Gulf region.

After that, said this Arab scholar, "events will take their own course, which is basically generalized civil war."

Harvard University's Ferguson, a leading analyst of modern wars, said history suggests "a kind of critical mass of violence can be reached in a multi-ethnic society after which it's really hard to stop." That seems the case in Iraq, he said.

"The only way this kind of thing ends is that one side wins," he said. "It's increasingly hard to imagine a happy power-sharing agreement among Shia, Sunni and Kurds. This one is going to run and run."

That winning side is likely to be the Sunnis, according to Said, who believes that minority's background of military and political leadership in Iraq better equips them for a fight. They can "easily triumph," he said, "unless there's extensive Iranian intervention," that is, on behalf of Iran's fellow Shiites in Iraq.

That kind of regional "spillover" has worried Mideast analyst W. Andrew Terrill, of the U.S. Army War College, since the conflict took on a sectarian look.

"Saudi Arabia, for example" _ a Sunni kingdom _ "would be hard-pressed to do nothing if the Shias in the Iraqi government were waging a war of conquest against the Sunni areas," he said. If not Saudi troops, "they would at least provide money, arms and other support."