CIAO DATE: 10/07
The National Interest
Keeping the Lid On
Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack
Abstract
IF THE surge fails, it is imperative that the United States have a plan for containing the Iraqi civil war. As painful as it may be to admit that the U.S. effort to bring peace and stability to Iraq has failed, our new priority must become preventing the Iraqi conflict from spilling over and destabilizing neighboring states. This will not be easy. In fact, the history of states trying to contain the "spillover" from civil wars suggests that it will be very hard for the United States to do so. But planning now may allow the United States to mitigate spillover’s worst effects.
What Spillover Means
THE COLLAPSE of Iraq into all-out civil war would mean more than just a humanitarian tragedy that could easily claim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and produce millions of refugees. Such a conflict is unlikely to contain itself. In other similar cases of all-out civil war the resulting spillover has fostered terrorism, created refugee flows that can destabilize the entire neighborhood, radicalized the populations of surrounding states and even sparked civil wars in other, neighboring states or transformed domestic strife into regional war.