Possible Iraqi Civil War after destruction of Shrine?

We've seen the violence escalating in Iraq between ethnic groups long sworn to domination and destruction of each other.

And now this.

Tuesday was an apocalyptic day in Iraq. I am not normally exactly sanguine about the situation there. But the atmospherics are very, very bad, in a way that most Western observers will miss.

Then real disaster struck. The guerriillas blew up the domed Askariyah shrine in Samarra. The shrine, sacred to Shiiites, honors 3 Imams or holy descendants of the Prophet. They are Ali al-Hadi, Hasan al-Askari, and his disappeared son Muhammad al-Mahdi. Thousands of Shiiites demonnstrated in Samarra and in East Baghdad, against this desecration.

Will the occupying American forces be blamed for this?  Very likely.

Most of Iraq, including its Shiite Muslim and Kurdish areas, is relatively free of the kind of violence seen in Samarra. Yet a failure to secure Samarra and other Sunni areas in central and western Iraq - where some 85 percent of the daily insurgent attacks take place - would threaten the unity of the nation and could determine the Bush administration's legacy in Iraq.

Last month, 33 police recruits from Samarra were killed when gunmen ambushed their bus and shot them in the head, execution-style.

Most Iraqis assumed that Sunni insurgents had killed the men as a warning to anyone else who might be considering joining the security forces.

But Brannon, the Bravo Company commander, suspects that the killings were an inside job by police officials vying for control of which tribes supply recruits.

It's not like we've done an excellent job of winning their support thus far...

The attack came after two days of vicious bloodshed and political turmoil. The Iraqi prime minister on Tuesday angrily denounced the growing American pressure to form an inclusive government, as a car bomb in a bustling market here killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens more, most of them women and children.

The explosion took place in the evening, with shoppers crowded into the Abu Cheer market on a Shiite block of southern Baghdad. Many women in flowing black robes had brought their children along. Hospital wards quickly filled with wailing victims, wiping blood from their faces or clutching limbs shredded by shrapnel.

"I noticed that a woman had lost her hand because of the explosion, and many of the bodies were burned," said Zuhair Ali Mudhair, 18, as he sat on the edge of a gurney in Yarmouk Hospital, with cloth bandages wrapped around his head and arm, and dried blood on his T-shirt. "Some of the kids were completely burned from the fire."

The violence on Monday, which killed at least 26 people, and the marketplace bombing and other attacks on Tuesday, which killed 28 people, signaled that a period of relative calm during political talks had come to an abrupt end.

Negotiations over the formation of a new government are taking place slowly and with much acrimony. Parties representing Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds are jockeying for control of various ministries and making demands on several crucial issues, like changing the makeup of the population around the northern oil fields.

The volatility of the political process was exacerbated Monday by suggestions from Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq, that the United States might decrease financial help to a government that excluded some sects and ethnic groups.

George W. could not have picked a more volatile region to invade if he'd tried.  And now our troops and the Iraqi people are suffering the brunt of it while he sits and plays president.