WASHINGTON — The election scheduled this month in Iraq could further inflame the country's conflict and increase the risk of civil war, Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to President Bush's father, said at a forum Thursday.
Rather than leading to stability, Scowcroft said, he feared that the election would further alienate Iraq's Sunni Muslim population and that it had "a great potential for deepening the conflict."
"Indeed, we may be seeing an incipient civil war [in Iraq] at the present time."
In one sense, the comments from Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, were not surprising: He has long been a critic of the Iraq war. But his stark warning about potential civil war marked one of the most ominous assessments about the implications of the upcoming election from a high-ranking former official.
Scowcroft made his comments at a luncheon sponsored by the New America Foundation, a centrist, nonpartisan Washington think tank. At the forum, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, also offered a grim prognosis for Iraq.
Brzezinski said the United States should meet its goals of producing a reasonably stable Iraqi government "if we are willing to put in 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have the draft and have some kind of wartime taxation."
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the remarks.
Scowcroft, an international business consultant in Washington, also served as national security advisor to President Ford. Scowcroft recruited Condoleezza Rice, Bush's choice as the next secretary of State, to her first White House job, hiring her as a Soviet expert at the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush.
The current Bush administration hopes that the planned parliamentary elections in Iraq will help end the insurgency by creating a government with broad popular support. But Scowcroft said he believed there was "a distinct possibility" that the balloting could lead to the breakup of the country by triggering violence between Shiite Muslim and Sunni Muslim forces, which in turn would prompt the Kurds to secede.
At the luncheon, attended by journalists and foreign policy experts, Scowcroft said the risk was that the election would deepen feelings of estrangement among Sunnis, who constitute an estimated 20% of the population but dominated Iraq under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein's rule.
