A Civil Question

President Bush won't talk about the prospect of civil war in Iraq and what it would mean to the U.S. troop presence. But it's becoming increasingly clear that he needs to.

Prompted by a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war, I wrote in yesterday's column about how Bush waved off any talk of civil war in his interview last week with ABC News's Elizabeth Vargas .

But it seems like everyone else is talking about it but him -- even his top envoy to Iraq.

Borzou Daragahi writes in the Los Angeles Times: "In remarks that were among the frankest and bleakest public assessments of the Iraq situation by a high-level American official, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the 'potential is there' for sectarian violence to become full-blown civil war.

" 'We have opened the Pandora's box and the question is, what is the way forward?' Khalilzad said. 'The way forward, in my view, is an effort to build bridges across [Iraq's] communities.' . . .

"Khalilzad said the U.S. has little choice but to maintain a strong presence in Iraq -- or risk a regional conflict in which Arabs side with Sunnis and Iranians back Shiites, in what could be a more encompassing version of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1 million dead.

"The ambassador warned of a calamitous disruption in the production and transport of energy supplies in the Persian Gulf. He described a worst-case scenario in which religious extremists could take over sections of Iraq and begin to expand outward.

" 'That would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play.' "

Mariam Karouny writes for Reuters: "After two weeks teetering toward sectarian civil war, Iraq is seeing something of a lull.

"Yet behind upbeat rhetoric that the crisis is over and a national unity coalition is in the works, Iraqi leaders are talking ever more gloomily in private about the country breaking apart. . . .

"A senior Shi'ite politician close to the interim government said talk of an impending civil war was misplaced. 'It depends what you mean by civil war,' he said. 'But as far as I can see we are already in an undeclared civil war.' "

Indeed, the idea that Iraq is already in a state of civil war is taking on more and more credence.