Many journalists and politicians are prophesizing that Iraq is already in an internecine Civil War. The Oxford Pocket American Dictionary defines civil war as “…war between citizens of the same country.”

It is hard to identify the citizens who are fighting the civil war in Iraq when you have so many groups fighting each other.You have the ousted Ba'athist party members and former Republican Guards who want to reinstate a Saddam Hussein type regime; then there are two regional powers, Syria and Iraq, who are sponsoring various insurgent groups; and then there are the international non-state Islamic Jihadist like al-Qaeda; and last but not least, you have the sectarian violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis.

While many political pundits have nothing but criticism of President's Bush's foreign policy in Iraq, Senator Joe Biden, (D), Delaware, and Les Gelb, of the Council of Foreign Relations, laid out what they call a “five-point plan” to keep Iraq together. The plan calls for:

•  A “central government” for common interest but decentralized autonomous regions for Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis.

•  Guaranteed proportionate share of oil revenues.

•  Massive jobs program with increased reconstruction aid “especially from the oil-rich Gulf states.

•  International conference to produce a “regional nonaggression pact.”

•  Phased redeployment of US troops this year and total withdrawal by 2007.

Funny, isn't 2007the year before the next presidential elections?

Let's look at the Biden/Gelb plan:

First, a decentralized form of government with regional autonomy for the three ethnic groups seems like a good idea until you look at the most recent examples where this was tried to stop sectarian violence. One example is the former Yugoslavia, where we now have three separate states that are all economic basket cases. Pakistan and India ended up having to partition their territories.

Second, who would guarantee the “proportionate oil revenue sharing plan” -- maybe 250,000 Coalition troops?

Point three shows a complete lack of political and cultural understanding by Biden and Gelb. The vast majority of “oil-rich Gulf states” are Sunni who would never want to see a Shiite autonomous region aligned with Iran.

Point four is the most ludicrous of all – a “nonaggression pact.” A nonstarter for so many reasons and anyone who has read world history over the last 200 years knows that this is out of the question. Alas, number five, which is the headline grabber – “phased redeployment of U.S. troops.”

Number five in the Biden/Gelb/Neville Chamberlain epistle is the rasion d'etre for the entire plan. This whole plan is a veiled attempt for another complaint against President Bush's foreign policy in the region. Withdraw seems to be the rallying cry for the many would-be U.S. presidential candidates that read part of the polls and see the American popular will turning against the war. However, they seem to ignore the other part of the poll that says the American people do not want a precipitous withdrawal.

President Bush is now most certainly facing triple jeopardy in the Middle East, with a fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, the ethnic violence in Iraq, and Iran's nuclear ambitions which all put the President's foreign policy to a test.

Hezbollah's victory claims in Lebanon have only emboldened the radicals in Iran to continue to prosecute the Shiite and Sunni sectarian ethnic cleansing in Iraq. But was it a victory?

Amir Taheri of The Wall Street Journal -- in an Thursday, August 24, 2006 article -- made an astute observation when he said: “Politically, however, Hezbollah had to declare victory for a simple reason: It had to pretend that the death and desolation it had provoked had been worth it. A claim of victory was Hezbollah's shield against
criticism of a strategy that had led Lebanon into war without the knowledge of its government and people. Mr. Nasrallah (Hezbollah's spiritual leader in Lebanon) alluded to this in television appearances, calling on those who criticized him for having triggered the war to shut up because ‘a great strategic victory' had been won.”

Hezbollah may have won the information war in the West but in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East and the broader Muslim world there are many talking about a pyrrhic victory that may draw all of them into a much larger conflagration.

There may be Civil War in Iraq but it is too hard to tell the players without a scorecard.

Recent news reports indicate threats from the Kurds at Session. This could lead to a real Civil War.

There will never again be a united Iraq.