A fighting chance in Iraq.(AT WAR II)

THE Iraq debate has become largely a matter of semantics: Is the country suffering a civil war or not? Hawks generally want to deny that this is a civil war for the same reason that opponents of the war insist that it is: The term "civil war" denotes for most people an unwinnable quagmire that the U.S. has no business being in the middle of. If the violence in Iraq is not as organized as in our own Civil War, or as pervasive as in Lebanon's, it is certainly severe enough to qualify as a civil war.

That doesn't mean it will inevitably spiral out of control. The wars of the Balkans in the 1990s were civil wars as well, but the West managed to intervene to promote a stable, if imperfect, settlement that ended the killings and prevented the violence from spreading more widely. The government in Iraq is still standing and includes all factions of the country, while it is the country's malign actors--the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militias--who are working hard to foment the sectarian violence that apparently still hasn't taken on an unstoppable momentum. These are factors in our favor. But it remains the case that success in Iraq seems more out of reach than it has at any time since the initial invasion three years ago.

One would think this would prompt a sense of dire urgency within the Bush administration, but if it has, it isn't evident. Prime Minister Maliki's plan to secure Baghdad--which amounted to a lot of checkpoints on the roads--has failed miserably. (The problem isn't the number of checkpoints, but finding someone trustworthy enough to man them.) In response, the U.S. and Maliki have a new plan to secure Baghdad. At this rate, "plan to secure Baghdad" will join "stay the course" as a phrase that can't be uttered about Iraq without causing derision.

The latest plan calls for 3,500 U.S. troops to redeploy from elsewhere in the country--including violent Anbar province--into Baghdad. It seems unlikely either that these troops can be spared from the areas they are leaving or that 3,500 Americans is enough to make a decisive difference in the capital city of nearly 6 million. Once again, the administration seems content with doing just enough perhaps--if it's lucky--to hold things together, rather than dramatically changing facts on the ground. It might be that achieving the reality of success is being held hostage to maintaining some facade of success. Sending 20,000 more troops to Baghdad might have more effect, but it would also serve to highlight the magnitude of the problem. We find it hard to believe that whatever the question in ...