Iraq's only hope for stability is a multilateral international force put in place with the co-operation of neighbouring countries, a British academic told a conference in Dublin at the weekend.
Dr Toby Dodge, reader in international politics at Queen Mary College in London, warned that such a possibility was unlikely and predicted decades more "horror and violence" in Iraq. He was addressing a conference on The US and Iraq: Reflections and Projections at the Clinton Institute in UCD, at which contributors outlined a bleak future for Iraq and the Middle East region.
Dr Dodge said: "If there is a solution and it is a big 'if', it must be multilateral, international and brought in with the neighbours' co-operation". The "solution isn't Iraqi and can't be. It has to be external to Iraq," he added.
There was no one single group in charge. Iraq's government was only in charge in a small area and there were four or five militias fighting for control. Neighbouring states were "pursuing their own interests rather than the Iraqis' and the one great loser in all this is the Iraqi population".
The Irish Times correspondent Lara Marlowe suggested that now was a "golden moment for Europe to seize the momentum and have a foreign policy" for Iraq and the region. Ms Marlowe said the civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims began as soon as Saddam Hussein's regime fell. Iran had won the war because "the three Shia parties that hold whatever power there is in the US-backed Iraqi government are all allied with Tehran".
She said "the disintegration of Iraq was foreseeable from the beginning, but it has taken bloodshed on a huge scale for the American public to wake up to the extent of the catastrophe - 3,700 Iraqis killed last month alone; by some estimates as many as 655,000 Iraqi lives lost since the invasion; nearly 3,000 dead US troops."
Before the war, Ms Marlowe said, "Iraqis were idealised as an oppressed people who longed to greet American liberators with flowers and song". US experts were "now saying the Iraqis are ingrates and animals, undeserving of the gift we bestowed upon them and the neo-conservatives who lobbied so hard for the Iraq war are jumping ship."
The question that haunted her most was "why is there no accountability in the US? Why has the Bush administration been allowed to destroy Iraq with impunity?" Ms Marlowe said: "I can find only one explanation for the things I have witnessed in Iraq since 2003: ignorance and arrogance."
Prof Marilyn Young of New York University said there was alack of imagination in the US administration.
"You can't imagine the vast indifference of this administration and their lack of imagination of what is happening in Iraq. They can't imagine the lives of others," she said.
