Editorial: Visions of a wider war

Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006 | 8:34 a.m.

A week before the Iraq Study Group released its report on Dec. 6, Vice President Dick Cheney got a stark vision of what could be the ultimate consequence of his aggressive support of President Bush's rash decision to invade Iraq.

The vision - a war that overtly transcends the boundaries of Iraq and pulls in other Middle Eastern countries - was provided by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, the Saudi capital, Cheney listened as the king said that his government would be forced to funnel money for weapons and other military supplies to Iraq's minority Sunni population if the United States pulled out of Iraq.

Saudi Arabia, the king said, would feel compelled to align itself with Iraq's Arab Sunnis. Otherwise, the king fears, they would be massacred by the majority Shiites in the absence of American troops.

The depth of the centuries-old conflict in the Middle East between Islam's two groups, the Shiites and Sunnis, was not an area of concern for the Bush administration as it aggressively promoted unproven (and ultimately false) evidence in whipping up reasons for going to war in Iraq.

Today, of course, the United States finds itself overwhelmed by the sectarian violence in Iraq that is killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians each week and pushing the U.S. death toll toward 3,000.

While United States' foreign policy must not ever be dictated by another country, the Saudi threat is just one more frightful complication among dozens of complex issues that the Bush administration never prepared for and is now trying desperately to cope with. The threat is deadly serious, as Iran, a Shiite country, would reciprocate by overtly supplying arms to Iraq's Shiites, and soon Iraq could expand from an internal civil war to a regional conflagration, threatening the world's oil economy.

But the Saudi threat is not a reason for Bush to shun the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, which he seems prepared to do. The bipartisan group's recommendation for a withdrawal involved combat troops. Remaining would be as many as 100,000 troops in training and support roles - enough forces to likely prevent Saudi Arabia from acting on its threat.

We believe Bush's best option for Iraq is to principally follow the study group's recommendations. If reports are true that he and the Pentagon are planning to go the other way, with a big "surge" in troops and new plans for more battles against sectarian factions, the vision of a regional war becomes even more clear.