Iraq is sinking into an all-out civil war that will likely spill over into its neighbors, resulting in mass deaths and refugee flows, a U.S. think-tank has predicted in a report.

Things Fall Apart, a 130-page report released on Monday by the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, paints a grim picture of the future for Iraq, according to U.S. media reports on Tuesday.

The report predicts disastrous consequences, including a serious disruption of Gulf oil supplies and a drastic decline in U.S. influence in the region.

To prevent that scenario, the report urged the Bush administration to draw up plans to contain the civil war.

However, even the administration successfully contains the civil war, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised."

But it was the "least bad option" open to the United States to protect its national interests in the event of a full-scale civil war.

The report said U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraqi cities, for it is "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be," as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

It also called for the creation of a regional group to help contain a civil war, which would see exactly the contact with Iran and Syria that the Bush administration has steadfastly refused.

The Washington think-tank said the report distills lessons learned from other civil wars, laying out the case histories of Afghanistan, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

Source: Xinhua