A question so good I wish I'd thought of it first

And from Thomas Friedman, of all people...who until recently was earnestly trying to find some kind of gold at the end of the Iraq War rainbow:

Since the start of the Iraq war, it's been clear that "victory" rested on the answer to one Big Question: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was — a country congenitally divided among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that can be held together only by an iron fist.

Unfortunately, to answer this big question — even Iraqis didn't know — the U.S. had to provide a minimum degree of security for all Iraqis, so people could feel relaxed enough to think beyond their most narrow tribal or religious identities. We didn't do that, because of President Bush's decision to approach the Iraq invasion with the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which calls for just enough troops to fail, rather than the proven Powell Doctrine, which calls for overwhelming force to win.

What happened in the absence of an overwhelming U.S. force was the looting of government buildings and ammo dumps, open borders for infiltrators, and then widespread insecurity, which naturally prompted Iraqis to fall back on tribal loyalties and militias, rather than trusting the Iraqi Army or the police. People are very good at figuring out who will protect them in a crisis, and too many Iraqis opted for local militias.

Yes, we are now better at training an Iraqi Army and have held national elections. But the failure to provide security after the invasion means we are trying to build these national institutions in competition with the insurgents, Qaeda terrorists, Shiite death squads and sectarian Iraqi militias that sprouted in the security vacuum.

One thing that covering the Lebanese civil war taught me was this: once sectarian militias take root, they develop their own interests and are very hard to uproot. "Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis of warlordism," the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Washington Post.

This did not have to be. The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more. Totally untrue. As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for more troops, but was ignored.

[snip]

It is Iraqis who will now tell Americans whether they should stay or go. A majority of Americans, in a gut way, always understood the value of trying to produce a democratizing government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. That is why there has been no big antiwar movement. Americans should, and will, stick with Iraq if they sense that Iraqis are on a pathway to building a decent, stable government. But Americans will not, and should not, baby-sit an Iraqi civil war. The minute they sense that's what's happening, you will see the bottom fall out of U.S. public support for this war.

Iraq is looking more and more like Yugoslavia every day, only more so. Ancient divisions and rivalries are often ONLY kept in check by a strongman like Tito -- or like Saddam Hussein.

The one area in which Friedman is mistaken is in assuming that the bottom has not yet fallen out of public support for this war. When even a Fox News poll (Acrobat Reader required) has 81% of Americans thinking Iraq will end up in civil war, the support is already not there. The Fox News poll is worth your time to read. The questions are obviously geared towards eliciting a pro-Bush response, and even that isn't working.