There are currently three and a half civil wars raging in the Arab world. Who will be next?

Of course, when it comes to Arab civil war, today’s Iraq takes the cake. On average, 60 Iraqis – Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Kurd – are assassinated daily.

Before Iraq, Lebanon’s civil war was the most dramatic and damaging in the Arab world. More than 200,000 civilians were obliterated between 1975 and 1990. Now Lebanon’s 400,000 Palestinian refugees, 1 million Shiites armed with heavy weapons and angst, secular Sunnis, and independent Lebanese (the Maronites), determined to face down neighboring Syria, threaten violent conflict. The next round promises to be bloodier than the first. Sooner or later, it will affect Israel, the leadership of which will take action to prevent blood from spilling over its borders.

Back in 1992, civil war broke out in Algeria following a failed election. A rotten army, in power since the country’s gained independence from France in 1962, has been battling machete brandishing, hallucinatory Islamists, who have committed some of history’s worst atrocities. To date, 110,000 Algerian civilians have been hacked to death.

The Palestinians are the latest to join the Arab-kill-Arab fraternity.

In Gaza, news reports Saturday showed bloody pictures of the leader of Palestinian intelligence – a senior member of the Fatah faction and ally of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. At least five others were killed when a bomb blew up the elevator in the official’s headquarters, a device most likely planted by an Islamist fundamentalist faction, Hamas.

Mr. Abbas, who has watched his authority evaporate, described the bombing of his own government’s complex as “regrettable.”

The Palestinian Arab civil war has raged largely unnoticed for decades. With several liberation fronts, each funded by various Muslim countries with various motives, Palestinian Arabs have been killing more of their own than of their alleged enemies, the Israelis.

At last count, about 15 armed Palestinian groups, gangs really, were operating independently. It was simply a matter of time before all of them started shooting at once. Now it’s happening. The Palestinian Arabs are proving their place beside the Iraqis, Lebanese, and Algerians.

To the question of what comes next, take your pick of three: Bahrain, Syria, or Egypt.

Bahrain is home to 400,000 oppressed Shiites ruled by a corrupt minority of less than 80,000 Sunni Arab potentates and Arab Sheiks. And the country’s just across the Persian Gulf from Shiite Iran and adjacent to Wahabi Saudi Arabia.

Syria will burn when it alights conflict in Lebanon, a process that Damascus is cooperating on with its ally, Iran.

Simmering in the distance is Egypt with its population of 72 million, its failed economy, its widening sectarian strife, and its corruption, which robs Egyptians of the hope for advancement. Muslim fanatics already have been killing members of the country’s Christian minority; bombing Red Sea tourist resorts; killing police officers and intellectuals, and spreading darkness with impunity for a decade.

Meanwhile, President Mubarak’s henchmen and his two thieving sons, Gamal and Alaa, are lining their pockets. America’s views on its “close ally” have been short-sighted.

My friends in Egypt tell me the atmosphere there resembles the final months before the assassination of Anwar el Sadat, who, while a darling of America, was widely hated in Egypt when he was killed in October 1981.

It’s time to sit back and watch the fireworks.