The sectarian violence in Iraq has the U.S. ambassador to that country warning of possible civil war. With the kidnappings of 50 security men and other mayhem in recent days, the BBC's Jim Muir tries to analyze the chaos.
Some excerpts:
The country is slipping gradually into a very dangerous and serious situation," said senior Shia politician Hussein Shahrastani in a BBC interview.
"After the attack on the shrines in Samarra, it became very clear that the insurgents and terrorists are determined to drag the country into civil confrontation and civil war.
Insurgents have attacked some of Shia Islam's most important shrines"Religious and political leaders have been prudent enough to control the masses from a violent backlash, but nobody can be sure [what will happen] if the terrorist attacks continue in this fashion." ...
(Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq) warned of a drastic scenario if Islamic extremists were able to use part of a fragmented Iraq as a base for regional expansion - it would make Afghanistan under the Taleban look like "child's play", he said. His grim assessment contrasted with more upbeat comments from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Peter Pace, who said on Sunday that things in Iraq were going "very, very well, from everything you look at".
Ambassador Khalilzad said the formation of an Iraqi national unity government would provide a major obstacle to those trying to push the country towards civil war.
But nearly three months on from the 15 December elections, the formation of any kind of government is still a distant prospect.
There is a deadlock over who should take the most powerful post of prime minister, with the Shia nomination of the incumbent Ibrahim al-Jaafari strongly rejected by the Kurdish, Sunni and secular factions, whose co-operation is necessary to the formation of a coalition government.
Once that problem is solved, haggling over both the political programme and the personnel in a national unity government is expected to take weeks, if not months.