According to Newsweek, a “senior Bush aide” said, “If there’s a full-blown civil war, the president isn’t going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire.”  If correct, this would be the first indication in years that some measure of sanity had crept into the foreign policy decisionmaking in this administration.  Finally, perhaps, the national interest might take precedence over dreams of hegemony and loopy fantasies about democracy and regional transformation.  Naturally, someone at The Corner was upset by this statement, prompting a perceptive critique from Spencer Ackerman at TNR’s The Plank:

He [Michael Rubin] calls his post at the Corner “How To Lose Iraq,” thereby implying that Iraq is “lost” not because of civil war but because of a U.S. withdrawal. Which makes sense–provided you believe that success in Iraq means occupying the country forever, or until the Hezbollah-and-Iran-sympathizers in the Iraqi government succeed in liquidating the Sunnis, which may as well be forever. And that’s as good a description as any of what U.S. troops would be dying for: to promote one faction of Islamists against another. I can see why Mike thinks we should stay the course.

 

Bonus Fun Fact: What really gets Rubin’s goat is the anonymous quote from a senior White House official to Newsweek, who told the magazine that “If there’s a full-blown civil war, the president isn’t going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire.” Rubin ripostes, “She might as well have hung a banner declaring, ‘You’re within inches of victory. Set off just a few more suicide bombs and we’ve had it.'” Why did Mike use the feminine pronoun? No, he’s not trying to be gender-neutral; he’s sending the subtle hint that he believes Newsweek‘s source is Meghan O’Sullivan, the National Security Council official in charge of Iraq. O’Sullivan, a Richard Haass protégé, is a bete noire to Rubin’s fellow neocons, who for years have blamed her–rather than their own disproven fantasies about Iraq and the Middle East–for the fiascos that the Iraq war and the “freedom agenda” are. Given the choice between pinning the tail on O’Sullivan or asking myself hard questions about war and peace in the mirror each morning when I shave, I’d make O’Sullivan my scapegoat, too.

It seems obvious to me that if there were a large-scale civil war, the sort that even the administration would admit to be a civil war (sectarian killings with dozens of casualties every month, you see, are just strong disagreements), leaving our soldiers in the middle of that for any reason would be as irresponsible as the decision to send them there in the first place.  Evidently the realists with any influence in this administration have had some success in driving that point home.  Withdrawal in the event of civil war would admit that the fantasy of transforming Iraq into a happy democratic land of peace and brotherhood was always just that, a fantasy, which many of us knew at the time and which some, such as Mr. Rubin, have yet to grasp, but it would be the only sane thing to do under the circumstances.  For that matter, withdrawing out of the middle of the current low-level civil war seems like an equally good idea, but one that Iraq hawks from both parties will never allow.