U.S. Holds Its Breath in Aftermath of Mosque Bombing

[RedEarth]

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (IPS) - Two days after the bombing of one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines in Iraq, analysts and officials here are holding their breath, desperately hoping that a rapid descent into a sectarian civil war in Iraq can still be avoided, if not reversed.

While a Friday curfew and appeals for restraint by religious leaders across Iraq appeared to have prevented any major outbreak of violence Friday, like that which reportedly took more than 130 lives and damaged or destroyed nearly 200 Sunni mosques on Wednesday and Thursday, experts here warned that it was far too early to exhale.

"It will take several days to see," according to ret. Amb. David Newton, who served as Washington's ambassador to Baghdad in the late 1980s. "If you can get through the next few days without any major events, there's a chance you can get the political process restarted. But that we're closer to the edge of the cliff in Iraq, there's no doubt."

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It's very clear that the Shiites are interpreting this chain of events as evidence that the Americans are weak and can't protect Shiite interests," Cole told IPS. "And now Americans are having to come back to the Shiites and ask them to be magnanimous and give away a lot of what they've won in elections."

"It was always going to be a very hard sell, but now it's an impossible argument; Shiites aren't going to give away any power at all at this point," he said, adding that, given the mathematics of putting together a government, "it's possible that there could be a hung parliament, the government would collapse, and you'd have to go to new elections. And that would be a disaster in the present circumstances

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32290