Iraqi civil war brewing?

Since Iraq's new democratic government was sworn in several weeks ago, there's been a terrible escalation of death and violence, triggering fears of a burgeoning civil war.

Those fears would be greatly reduced if Iraq wasn't becoming the new nesting ground for foreign jihadists and terrorists, such as those chased out of Somalia and Afghanistan. Power will rush to fill a vacuum, and the bad guys are using Iraq's inability to maintain law and order - fueled by anti-American propaganda - to create a power vacuum that extreme Islamic fanatics hope to fill.

If the only insurgents were domestic - i.e., Saddam loyalists and other disgruntled Sunnis unhappy at not being in power anymore - the government probably could learn to deal with them pretty quickly. Sunni malcontents don't have much of a following beyond the Sunni triangle, and the worst damage they inflict is usually with roadside blasts caused by IEDs - improvised explosive devices.

The IEDs can take several lives and cause several injuries at a time. Suicide bombers, however, can take several dozen lives and cause several dozen injuries at a time - sometimes a lot more. The ranks of suicide bombers aren't recruited domestically; they and other radical warriors are recruited from many Arab nations via a vast network of Web sites run by radical Islamists.

According to The Washington Post, independent experts who monitor the sites believe the messages come directly from al-Qaida militants who are making Iraq a jihadist melting pot, training ground and indoctrination center.

These are the most dangerous and difficult "insurgents" to defeat because of their fanaticism and willingness to die. Recently, the U.S. military engaged some of them in a bloody, deadly offensive near the Syrian border in western Iraq.

A most distressing discovery about the foreign jihadists pouring into Iraq is how many are from Saudi Arabia. As was the case on 9-11, most of the suicide bombers, according to the online Web sites, are Saudis.

The Saudis' ruling royal family is supposedly "embarrassed" at reports that so many of its citizens are involved in terrorism and suicide bombings. But this is an old story.

The Saudis are very adept at fighting terrorism with one hand while encouraging it with the other. The desert kingdom practices and teaches a brutal theocratic form of Islam that, for many of its people, leads inevitably to the kind of Muslim terrorism that's tearing up Iraq.

The Saudis have been getting away with this because of the West's, particularly the United States', dependence on oil. But in light of these latest findings, we suspect Americans are running out of patience with this two-faced policy. It's time for the Saudis to decide whose side they're really on.