From the Center for American Progress:

The NYT reports countries in the Middle East increasingly see the surge of violence in Iraq as a sign that the United States, "rather than helping to stamp out extremism, might have created a new, toxic incubator for it." President Bush repeatedly said Iraq would serve as a model of democracy in the region. Instead, "there is an almost universal sense in the Arab world that Washington is paying the price for entering Iraq with no coherent plan beyond toppling Saddam Hussein, and that the anarchy they allowed to run unchecked in the first days of occupation a year ago has never really been tamed." This has led to widespread concern in the region that "the violence will further inflame existing divisions in Iraq, which could easily provoke similar ethnic or religious schisms in neighboring states."

The is one of the (many) things that freaks me out about our current situation in Iraq and the current administration - if I, a person with no foreign policy knowledge or experience, feared that this was one possible outcome of our war with Iraq, why the hell didn't it occur to *any* experts in the administration that this was even a possibility?! Ok, obviously it ocurred to some, but the people who matter and make the decisions clearly didn't listen to them. So why are they still in positions of power when they were so clearly and unequivocally wrong in such a tragically big way?