And here's the "nightmare" case for Iraq

To counterbalance the positive spin of today's WSJ editorial by Edward Luttwak, here is a summary of yesterday's news analysis feature, "If Iraq Worsens, Allies See 'Nightmare' Case."


The WSJ polled a variety of experts and observers to see what their worst-case thinking looked like and these are the two basic scenarios they came up with:


1. Kenneth Pollack at the Brookings Institution and Daniel Byman of the Rand Corp. think Iraq could becomes the world's premier sanctuary for terrorism, and this would incite minority uprisings in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

2. The Iraq Study Group believes that if ethnic cleansing gets out of hand in Iraq, eventually it will draw in the country's neighbors: Turkey, to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state; and Iran to seize control of the Shiite areas - not to mention the oil fields. They think this scenario could take decades to play out and include, in the reports own words, "the radicalization of populations, mass movements of populations, and regime changes."


As the WSJ reports, the Saudis have already "warned the Bush administration that they are prepared to aid the Sunni militias in Iraq if the Sunni population there becomes imperiled ...[and] Jordanian officials have told the Pentagon that they may move troops into Iraq's uninhabited western desert as a buffer if events there spiral out of control."


The graphic the WSJ provided is worth at least a 1,000 words so I'll publish it here.