While we got the administration denying any chance of Iraq heading towards a civil war, even the US envoy is warning of the threat of a “wider war”. From today’s L.A. Times:

The top U.S. envoy to Iraq said Monday that the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime had opened a “Pandora’s box” of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions that could engulf the region in all-out war if America pulled out of the country too soon.

In remarks that were among the frankest and bleakest public assessments of the Iraq situation by a high-level American official, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the “potential is there” for sectarian violence to become full-blown civil war.

Meanwhile the New York Times is reporting that the U.S. forces are working to try and reduce the Shiite domination in the Iraqi security forces.

As the threat of full-scale sectarian strife looms, the American military is scrambling to try to weed out ethnic or religious partisans from the Iraqi security forces.

The United States faces the possibility that it has been arming one side in a prospective civil war. Early on, Americans ceded operational control of the police to the Iraqi government. Now, the police forces are overseen at the highest levels by religious Shiite parties with militias, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year.

The American military is trying an array of possible solutions, including quotas to increase the number of Sunni Arab recruits in police academies, firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias, and sending 200 training teams composed of military police officers or former civilian police officers to Iraqi stations, even in remote and risky locations.

What is amazing on this is the fact that what war opponents warned about it coming to life. People who knew about the religious diversity in Iraq also knew that Saddam, while very brutal, kept that diversity in check. Mean while we got lead into a war anyways by a President who did not even know the difference between Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds. What has this all lead to? Well it looks more and more like we are entering a quagmire and at the cost of tens of thousands of lives including the lives of 2,302 U.S. military.