“If there's a desire to postpone the elections, it's going to have to come from within Iraq,” Ross said.

Diamond, once an insider and a close player in Iraq, went even further by warning “Iraq is about to reach a point of no return,” and calling for a necessary delay with the aim of engaging the Sunnis.

In a recent article in The New York Times, Diamond said the US administration must mull a delay of the vote in exchange for the cooperation of the Iraqi Sunnis who boycott the vote.

“What is needed now is for all of Iraq's social and political stakeholders to sit down and talk.”

“The outlines of a compromise are visible.”

Former president Bill Clinton's Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, on his part, called for the creation of a “national reconciliation conference” in Iraq to end violence in the country.

“If there's a desire to postpone the elections, it's going to have to come from within Iraq, it's going to have to come from some understanding worked out between an emerging Sunni group that is there and the Shiites,” he told CBS television.

Ross, however, warned that any delay of the January elections would pose enormous risks in the war-ravaged country.

“We have a civil war guaranteed if the Shiites are the ones who become disaffected,” Ross said.

“Right now, it's a Sunni-led insurgency. And it's very difficult as it is. If you lose the Shiites as well, then you have not only a civil war, you have something that from an American standpoint will look a lot like Vietnam.”

Several politicians and party officials in Iraq are pressing for a six-month delay of the vote over the increasing deteriorating security conditions.

Unabated Bloodshed

The US analysts and officials further believe the raging violence in the country would keep the Iraqi voters, especially in the predominantly Sunni areas, away from casting ballot in the polls, allowing the Iraqi Shiites to dominate the elections and leading to more insecurity in the country.

As a case in point, six Iraqi policemen were killed Tuesday, January 11, in a car bomb blast in ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, AFP reported.

“At approximately 9:30 am (0630 GMT) on January 11 in northern Tikrit anti-Iraqi forces detonated a vehicle borne improvised explosive device in the vicinity of a police station, killing six Iraqi police,” the US military said in a statement.

Several other people were also wounded in the attack, which came a day after Baghdad's deputy police chief was killed in an ambush.

The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), the highest religious authority in the country, pressed for a boycott of the elections, citing the impossibility of organizing fair elections held under current deteriorating conditions.

Also, the Islamic Party, a major Sunni political player, recently backtracked on its earlier decision to vie, dealing a huge blow to the process.

But the call to delay the polls was shrugged off by the interim Iraqi government and its US backers, especially after top Shiite scholars threatened to withhold support for the interim government.

UN Iraqi envoy Lakhdar Brahimi also warned that holding the elections would be impossible unless “first and foremost security improves” with many, including Britain’s The Independent, expecting the vote to be one of the most “secretive” polls in history.

On Monday, January 10, the question of how the US might ever start pulling out its troops from Iraq was highlighted in a report by the New York Times.

The report showed US president George Bush as still hoping the controversial polls to be a promising one.