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Overview: The Iraq War

The American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 toppled the brutal authoritarian government of Saddam Hussein, but unleashed a massive sectarian civil war that, as of late 2007, has no end in sight.

At the heart of the struggle is the ascent by the majority Shiite Arabs to ruling status. Fervently opposed to the Shiite-led government are armed factions of Sunni Arabs who chafe at the overturning of the old order. British colonialists installed Sunni Arabs as proxy rulers in the early 20th century, and Sunni families and tribes managed to hold onto power after Iraq was granted independence and even as the country's Shiite population steadily increased. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni strongman from the north who crushed anyone opposed to him, but reserved some of his most vicious punishments for the Shiite Arabs and Kurds, two groups in Iraq that have long sought a significant measure of power or independence.

In 2002 and 2003, President George Bush cited the possibility of Saddam Hussein acquiring weapons of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- and thus posing a direct threat to the United States -- as the main rationale for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. He and other senior American officials also said Mr. Hussein had direct ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden. After the Americans ousted Mr. Hussein, they searched for evidence in Iraq to bolster both claims but have so far found nothing.

Some of the first steps the American occupation authority took in 2003 are blamed by critics for igniting the Sunni-led insurgency: disbanding the Iraqi Army and purging members of the former ruling Baath Party from government and public life. Yet, the conflict between the Sunni Arabs and the Shiites is at its heart a deeply existential one: rarely since the Sunni-Shiite sectarian split in the 7th century have Shiite Arabs ever held any significant power, and many Sunni Arabs today regard the rise of the Iraqi Shiites as an upheaval of the proper Islamic order. Eighty to 90 percent of the world's Muslims are estimated to be Sunnis; demography and history have always favored the Sunnis.

To put the majority Shiites in power, the Americans held a series of elections in 2005. Iraqis largely voted along ethnic and sectarian lines, further reinforcing the rifts in Iraqi society that had widened under Mr. Hussein. Moreover, to the disappointment of the Bush administration, the parties that the Iraqis voted for were overwhelmingly conservative and religious. A Shiite coalition cobbled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, won the most votes in both sets of parliamentary elections in 2005 and consequently took control of the government. This further inflamed the Sunni Arab insurgency as well as bringing new worries to the American government.

The Iraq war has had a broad destabilizing effect across much of the Middle East. Many observers of the region say the biggest winner so far of the war is Iran, which is ruled by Shiite Persians and has close ties to Iraq's Shiite leaders. Emboldened by Shiite ascendancy and by the diversion of American power and resources into Iraq, Iran has pressed its agenda across the region, which in turn has alarmed Sunni Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Another disturbing regional effect with far-reaching consequences is the exodus of Iraqi refugees to neighboring countries. About 2 million have fled to Syria and Jordan alone.

That is a direct effect of the sectarian cleansing that has taken place in mixed cities across Iraq, with Sunni and Shiite militias taking over neighborhoods and driving out residents of the opposite sect. Arab and Kurdish tensions also run high. In the northern city of Mosul, Kurdish and Christian enclaves have been under attack by Sunni Arab militants, while in the oil city of Kirkuk, which has significant populations of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens, bombings and shootings have long been a regular part of daily life.

Starting in summer of 2007, violence in parts of central and western Iraq, including Baghdad, dropped sharply for a number of reasons. Most significantly, some Sunni Arab groups that had been fighting the Americans and Shiite-led government decided to turn their guns on rival Sunni Arab groups, many of which are members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a home-grown fundamentalist militia with foreign fighters in its ranks. The American military is giving money and arms to their new Sunni Arab allies, collectively called the Awakening, though Shiite leaders remain suspicious of the Sunnis' intentions.

Also in 2007, acting on the request of General David H. Petraeus, the commander of American forces in Iraq, President Bush decided to increase troop levels in the country to 168,000. Commonly called "the surge," the increase in troops helped General Petraeus push forward with a strategy to set up small operating bases in some of the most violent neighborhoods in Baghdad, contributing to the drop in violence in those areas. But the pace of deployment and operations has severely strained the American military, especially the United States Army, and President Bush began lowering troop levels in late 2007.

The White House and American commanders say the purpose of the troop increase was to try to dampen the violence to a degree that would allow political reconciliation among the warring Iraqi factions. In early 2008, as the Iraq war approaches its sixth year, the main question is whether that kind of reconciliation will take place. Leaders of the main factions have haggled over issues behind closed doors and urged Parliament to pass some conciliatory measures. Moktada al-Sadr, the young, rebellious Shiite cleric, has imposed a temporary ceasefire on his militia, the Mahdi Army. But the Iraqi leaders, as well as their supporters in the greater Middle East, have yet to reach a grand peace accord that will truly pull Iraq back from the abyss of a failed state. Parliament was able to agree on one large-scale legislative package, bundling together measures on a federal budget, provincial elections and revising restrictions on former members of Mr. Hussein's Baath party. But the elections were vetoed by the country's presidential council and many Sunnis complained that the new de-Baathification measure was in some ways harsher than the old one.— Edward Wong, Feb. 15, 2008

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