Is Iraq Falling Apart?

Less than a week after the final U.S. troops pulled out, a string of more than a dozen bombings have left more than 60 dead in largely Shiite neighbors around Baghdad. It apparent signals a resumption of the Shiite-Sunni violence that Saddam Hussein – and then the U.S. military – kept largely bottled up for decades. “These are the kinds of attacks that can take Iraq right back to 2006” when the country found itself amid a civil war, warns Stephen Biddle, an Iraq expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But the attacks – and more like them sure to come – don’t necessarily mean the country is falling apart, says Anthony Cordesman, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This kind of unstable transition is almost typical of what happens under these conditions, and Iraq may muddle through,” he says. “This political power struggle may actually catalyze something approaching a real national compromise.” But Cordesman, in a report released Wednesday, concludes the war was a misadventure for Washington.

“U.S. and Iraqi forces scored impressive tactical victories against the insurgents in Iraq from 2005-2009, but the U.S. invasion now seems to be a de facto grand strategic failure in terms of its cost in dollars and blood, its post-conflict strategic outcome, and the value the US could have obtained from different uses of its political, military, and economic resources,” he writes. Read More