Part of me wants to take this seriously and patiently explain why I think Mr. Sullivan is incorrect. For one thing, he underestimates the power and persistence of victimization narratives. It's not a difficult rhetorical leap to take such a situation and say, "see, the West is trying to divide Muslims against each other - that was the plan all along". That's the great thing about a victimization narrative, you see. Whatever the heck happens, it was exactly what the Victimizers had been planning all along. Beyond that, though, it's not clear to me how framing the conflict in Iraq as a battle over the soul of Islam itself - a battle fought between extremist fanatics and, err, non-extremist non-fanatics, I suppose - could make sense anywhere but in the hopeful head of a pundit. And anyway, most people in the region view its various conflicts as interconnected. How exactly will the Islam v. West framing lose its salience while U.S. involvement in the region (sabre-rattling with Iran, supporting Israel, etc etc) persists along roughly the same lines as before?

But, there's only so much serious debunking that can be done in the face of such a silly, wishful argument. From reading his blog, Sullivan has been frustrated for some time by the stubborn refusal of Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims to see things through the narratives we want them to. But now he thinks that if we just butt out of Iraq then a rapidly entrenching ethnic and sectarian conflict over power and prestige within a particular state will finally make Muslims the world over realize that "current Muslim pathologies, paranoia and self-hatred" are the problem? That's not even wrong. That's a non-sequitur. He seems to be hoping that al-Qaeda (whatever that name even means in Iraq right now) will be so brutal that their tactics will turn Muslims off to extremism, but it's a waste of breath if people on the ground don't even read the conflict in those terms.

And, maybe the argument doesn't really need to make sense. Sullivan is ultimately arguing that withdrawing from Iraq is a better idea than staying and getting even further bogged down in a civil war America can neither solve nor manage. He knows his audience well enough to know that depressing predictions don't sell well in America - that's why freedom is always and forever on the march - and so I think he's looking, increasingly desperately, for some kind of silver lining to be found in a withdrawal, and he's settled upon the happy hallucination of a civil war that will finally lay bare the evil of al-Qaeda for all Muslims to see. Something to make withdrawal sound like a bold strategic ploy. So, he's grasping at straws in the hopes that maybe, if you look at it from just the right angle, failure is actually victory.