Keeping the lid on.

• Author: Byman, Daniel
• Position: IF THE surge fails, it is imperative that the United States have a plan for containing the Iraqi civil war - Viewpoint essay

IF THE surge fails, it is imperative that the United States have a plan for containing the Iraqi civil war. As painful as it may be to admit that the U.S. effort to bring peace and stability to Iraq has failed, our new priority must become preventing the Iraqi conflict from spilling over and destabilizing neighboring states. This will not be easy. In fact, the history of states trying to contain the "spillover" from civil wars suggests that it will be very hard for the United States to do so. But planning now may allow the United States to mitigate spillover's worst effects.

What Spillover Means

THE COLLAPSE of Iraq into all-out civil war would mean more than just a humanitarian tragedy that could easily claim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and produce millions of refugees. Such a conflict is unlikely to contain itself. In other similar cases of all-out civil war the resulting spillover has fostered terrorism, created refugee flows that can destabilize the entire neighborhood, radicalized the populations of surrounding states and even sparked civil wars in other, neighboring states or transformed domestic strife into regional war.

Terrorists frequently find a home in states in civil war, as Al-Qaeda did in Afghanistan. However, civil wars just as often breed new terrorist groups--Hizballah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat of Algeria, and the Tamil Tigers were all born of civil wars. Many such groups start by focusing on local targets but then shift to international attacks--starting with those they believe are aiding their enemies in the civil war. This process is already underway in Iraq; the 2005 hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan were organized from Iraqi territory. Iraq-based groups are also inspiring others to emulate their targets and tactics. As they regularly do in Iraq, jihadist terrorists have tried to strike Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, a switch from the jihadists' past avoidance of oil targets. Moreover, their Improvised Explosive Device technologies are showing up in Afghanistan. (1) Suicide bombing, heretofore largely unknown in Afghanistan, is also now a regular occurrence, with the Iraq struggle providing a model to jihadists in Al-Qaeda's former home.

In turn, an ongoing civil war can contribute to the radicalization of populations in neighboring countries. Already, the war has heightened Shi'a-Sunni tension throughout the Middle East. In March 2006, after Sunni jihadists bombed the Shi'i Askariya Shrine in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra, over 100,000 Bahraini Shi'a took to the streets in anger. Bahraini Shi'a are simultaneously horrified at the suffering of their co-religionists in Iraq and emboldened by their political successes. As one Bahraini Shi'a politician noted, "Whenever things in Iraq go haywire, it reflects here." (2)

And as Iraq descends into further violence, the numbers of refugees will likely increase exponentially. Iraq has already generated roughly two million refugees with another one million internally displaced. These represent large groupings of embittered people who can serve as a ready recruiting pool for armed groups still waging the civil war. And as the wars in Africa's Great Lakes region show, foreign countries where refugees find shelter can become caught up in the civil war. At times, the refugees simply bring the war with them: The fighters mingle with non-combatant refugees and launch attacks back in their home countries, while those who drove them out continue the fight against the refugees in their new bases. Neighboring governments may try to defend refugees on their soil from attacks by their enemies or at times exploit the refugees as a proxy for the governments' own ambitions. Moreover, large refugee flows can overstrain the economies and even change the demographic balances of small or weak neighboring states, upsetting what is often a delicate political balance.

Then there is the "demonstration effect" caused when a civil war involves one group seeking separation or independence as the solution to its problems. Sometimes, other groups in similar circumstances (either in the state in civil war or in neighboring countries) follow suit if the first group appears to have achieved some degree of success. Thus Slovenia's secession from Yugoslavia started the first of those civil wars, but it also provoked Croatia to declare its independence, which forced Bosnia to follow suit--and in both of the latter cases Serb enclaves within both countries sought to secede from the seceding state and join with Serbia.

All the problems created by these and other forms of spillover often provoke neighboring states to intervene--to stop terrorism as Israel tried repeatedly in Lebanon, to halt the flow of refugees as the Europeans tried in Yugoslavia and the Iranians in Afghanistan, or to end (or respond to) the radicalization of its own population as Syria did in Lebanon. These interventions usually turn out badly for all involved. Iraq is already seeing both actual intervention and threats of intervention. Iran has hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of intelligence and paramilitary personnel in Iraq and is arming an array of Iraqi groups. Leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have all threatened interventions of their own, both to mollify domestic sentiment and to counter what they see as unchecked Iranian gains from Tehran's intervention.

What Can We Do--or Avoid Doing?

IF IRAQ spirals into an all-out civil war, the United States will have its work cut out attempting to prevent spillover from destabilizing the region and threatening key governments, particularly Saudi Arabia. Not being prepared to quickly fall back to a containment posture will lead to an ad hoc approach that will involve many avoidable mistakes and missed opportunities.

One of the most difficult challenges for the United States will be simply to not make a bad situation worse. Many of the policy options being discussed for Iraq, however, have the potential not only to fail, but to further undermine U.S. interests.

In this respect, Washington should not try to pick "winners."...