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Hope is still limping along, trying to flee a deadly fate (by BRONWEN MADDOX)

IS IRAQ now in a civil war? British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says not. Straw, who had been in Baghdad barely a day earlier, said the bomb which pulverised Samarra’s golden dome on Wednesday was the work of a few terrorists and was condemned by most Iraqis. That is, by now, a stock response. We have heard it every time that violence jerks the country backwards from the tattered remains of the US’s vision of its future. On Wednesday, looking at the mound of pink-brown mud where the gleaming gold bulb of the Al Askari mosque’s dome had stood, it seemed as if Iraq had been blasted back hundreds of years.

Yet Straw has half a point. For all the quibbling about when exactly to award Iraq the label of “civil war”, it is fair to say that if you’re in one, you know it. The violence makes daily life impossible. Everyone is on one side or the other. Iraq is not yet there. But where Straw’s remark is too blithe is that it would not take much to get there. Wednesday’s blast points the way. Sunni bombers, setting out to destroy one of the most sacred shrines for Shi’ites, aimed to spark a sectarian war. If they do it again on other sites, it is easy to see how they would grab their prize.

To see the face of civil war, you have only to multiply the wreckage of the Al Askari shrine across the country. Wednesday there was a foretaste of that spectacle. Shi’ite gunmen in Baghdad attacked at least 17 Sunni mosques and shot dead a Sunni cleric from a mosque in north Baghdad. The Samarra attack represented a change in the choice of target by sectarian terrorists – from people to religious symbols. Both are hideously destructive. The killings by Shi’ites and Sunnis has accelerated partition of the communities. Those who felt safe no longer do, and leave. Mixed neighbourhoods become one-sided in weeks.

But the assault on the shrine may prove even more inflammatory. The “before” and “after” pictures of the dome, commanding television screens across the region, are as stark a message as a party political broadcast. And some politicians were keen to seize the cause. One of the most senior Shi’ite political leaders blamed the bomb, through tortuous logic, on the US Ambassador. That is the case for pessimism; in Iraq, always an easy one. There are a few, more hopeful signs. The most important is the call for peace and restraint from Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, the towering figure among the Shi’ite clerics.

At times of potential turmoil, he has emerged to call for calm. Maybe he can do the same again, calling to those who want neither side of the sectarian split. Ali Al Bayati, from the Iraqi Embassy in London, claimed that the people of Samarra, mainly Sunni, had looked after the shrine for 1,000 years and were appalled, like Shi’ites, at its destruction. Yet the clear hope of Wednesday’s bombers was to set off a chain of religious assaults which join together to form the path to civil war.

-The Times

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