Marr, of the U.S. Institute of Peace, has seen a lot of Iraqi history, having first gone there in the 1950s. She knows what has been lost since the U.S. invasion of 2003: "We've destroyed more than we intended – the army, the bureaucracy, the middle class is in bad shape and many are leaving, and now we're getting ethnic cleansing. These are hard things to put back. These are very fundamental changes.

"I have problems myself seeing where it's going to end," she said. But "Iraq could tend to break up."

A better scenario – "but I'm not telling you it's the most likely" – would be a "muddling through" in which the current level of violence continues for years and factions "finally get tired of it and they begin to make agreements," Marr said.
That kind of regional "spillover" has worried Mideast analyst 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."
In his classic study of those times, "A Peace to End All Peace," Boston University's Fromkin quoted an American missionary who warned the British in Baghdad against tying Arab and Kurdish provinces, Sunni and Shiite provinces together: "You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity!"

Nonetheless, Fromkin said, Iraq once looked as though it might hold together, under the late president Saddam Hussein's iron fist. But today, "if I had to bet, I would bet on disintegration" into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish entities.
The Star

Andy Terrill spent 8 months with me in the Army Operations Center in Desert Shield and Storm. Fromkin's book is excellent.

Best

Tom