How easy it is to put hatred on a map
Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide our potential enemies
by Robert Fisk

Buy Time magazine, dear reader, turn to page 30, and what will you find? "How to Tell Sunnis and Shi'ites Apart." Helpful, uh? And after this, are columns of useful, divisive information. "Names," for example. "Some names carry sectarian markers... Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman ... men with these names are almost certainly Sunni. Those called Abdel-Hussein and Abdel-Zahra," (I have never in met an "Abdel-Zahra" by the way) "are most likely Shi'ite." Then there are columns headed "Prayer", "Mosques", "Homes", "Accents" and "Dialects", even - heaven spare us - "cars". The last, for those readers not already reeling in disbelief, tells us which car stickers to look out for (spot a picture of Imam Ali and you know the driver is Shia) or which licence plate (Anbar province registrations, for instance) means a probable Sunni driver. Thanks again. I don't know why the American military doesn't just buy up this week's edition of Time and drop the lot over Baghdad to help any still ignorant local murderers with easy-to-identify targets. But will Time be helping us to identify America's deeply divided society (who has most rubbish in their gardens in Washington, which bumper stickers to look for in Dearborn, Michigan)? Will they hell. I, too, am guilty of playing these little sectarian games in the Middle East. I ask a Lebanese where he or she comes from, not to remember the mountains or rivers near their home but to code them into my map. But I easily come unstuck. The man who tells me he comes from the Lebanese south (Shia) turns out to live in the southern Druze town of Hasbaya. The woman who tells me she's from Jbeil (Christian) turns out to be from the town's Shia minority. Oh, if only these pesky minorities would go and live in the right bit of our imperial, sectarian maps. And we go on talking to our Sunni monarchs in the Middle East - we listen to their raving about the "Shia crescent" - no wonder we hate Shia Iran so much. And we go on dividing and scissoring up the lands, and printing more and more of our racial maps and I do wonder most seriously if we wish to promote civil war across this part of the world, and you know what? I rather think we do.

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Beyond Quagmire
A panel of experts convened by Rolling Stone agree that the war in Iraq is lost. The only question now is: How bad will the coming explosion be?

WORST-CASE SCENARIO WORLD WAR III Freeman: This could become the Islamic equivalent of the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics in Europe in the 1600s -- a religious schism that blossoms into overt mayhem and murder and massacres and warfare. The various Iraqi factions will obtain the backing of other Middle Eastern states as they conduct their ideological and ethnic struggles. It will be a free-for-all that spreads beyond the anarchic zone of Iraq. Scheuer: The Shiites in Iran will not tolerate the re-emergence of a Sunni government in Iraq. And the last thing the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Jordanians and the rest of the Sunni-dominated states will tolerate is letting the Shia control another oil-rich state in the Muslim heartland. So you're going to see those states running guns and money to Sunni fighters in Iraq. For Jordan and Egypt, this is a golden opportunity to send their young firebrands to fight in Iraq as they did in Afghanistan. It's kind of a pressure-release valve for Sunni dictatorships: People who would be out causing problems because their governments aren't Islamic enough will be out in Iraq fighting the ultimate heretics, the Shia.

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