Fears of ‘spillover’ in region
By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: January 28 2007 20:07 | Last updated: January 28 2007 20:07
Iraq is rapidly sliding into an all-out civil war that is likely to spill over into neighbouring countries, resulting in mass deaths and refugee flows, serious disruption of Gulf oil supplies and a drastic decline in US influence in the region.
This grim forecast is set out in Things Fall Apart, a 130-page report released on Monday by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy that also recommends how the US might contain the disastrous consequences of “spillover”.
The Washington think-tank distils what it says are the lessons learned from other civil wars, laying out the case histories of Afghanistan, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yugoslavia.
Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration official and CIA analyst who co-authored the report with Daniel Byman, told the FT they were looking for a “Goldilocks solution” – somewhere between “stay the course” and “getting all out”.
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