President Bush barreled straight ahead with old answers when ABC's Elizabeth Vargas asked him a new question about Iraq last week. And like any driver who missed a turn in the road, the president quickly found himself in a ditch.
Vargas sensibly asked Bush how the growing civil strife in Iraq between the majority Shiites and the Sunnis who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein might change the U.S. mission there. Bush, to his credit, acknowledged the importance of encouraging Iraqis to form a "unity government" in the dangerously prolonged political haggling that has followed December's election.
But the president gave no hint he'd considered how the widening gulf between Sunni and Shiite might alter America's strategy. Instead, he summoned old sound bites, as if cueing them on tape. "The troops are chasing down terrorists," he told Vargas. And: "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."
Those arguments reflect the model that Bush, his aides and most Americans have used to understand the war in Iraq. In that framework, Iraq -- like Vietnam -- is a contest between a central government and an insurgency determined to overthrow it.
But many experts are asking whether that construct really explains the challenge in Iraq anymore -- especially after the horrific sectarian violence that swept the country following the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former advisor to the U.S.-led occupying authority in Iraq, concisely expressed the evolving view when he wrote in the latest issue of the New Republic: "Iraq is in the midst of a civil war."
If Iraq is morphing from a struggle against insurgents into something more like a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, Bush's responses to Vargas raise more questions than they answer. What does "chasing down terrorists" mean when neighbors are killing neighbors? And does training the Iraqi forces to "stand up" point toward greater stability, or greater friction, when many Sunnis see the military as the weapon of the Shiites?
Bush isn't alone in dodging those deeper questions. Few leaders in either U.S. party have said much about how growing civil strife in Iraq might change the calculus there for America. But the shift in the Iraq conflict is likely to scramble the U.S. debate in ways unpleasant for each side.
