Back from the brink.

THE much-anticipated full-blown Iraqi civil war is not upon us, at least not yet. In the wake of the savage Golden Mosque bombing, it seemed that the extraordinary forbearance of Iraq's Shiites in the face of three years (and more) of provocation might finally have reached its end. But all of Iraq's political leaders--even the thuggish Moqtada al-Sadr--called for calm and an end to the violence.

Civil war is in no one's interest except al-Qaeda's. It hopes to ruin the American project in Iraq, by destroying the country around us, and perhaps take power--at least in some Iraqi rump state--in the ensuing chaos. All the major players realize this, so they all worked to talk the country back from the brink, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who, as usual, played an admirably responsible role.

None of this is to suggest that the situation in Iraq is anything less than deadly serious. A strong government must have a monopoly on force, and as long as there are private militias the Iraqi government won't have one. The mosque attack may have increased the prestige of the militias as defenders of the Shiites. With every day that passes, the prospect of putting the militias out of business seems more remote.

As bad as the existence of the militias is, their infiltration into government security forces is worse. The interior ministry, which runs the police, has become a hiring program for the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) party. The ministry is a rat's nest of death squads and torture cells. U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been pushing to clean it up.

His reward was a ridiculous attack by the head of SCIRI, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who blamed him for the Golden Mosque assault. Khalilzad got it from the other side too. Sunnis blamed the U.S. for not doing more to protect them from reprisals. The U.S. is a convenient pincushion for blame, but the fate of Iraq ultimately rests on the shoulders of Iraqis, and depends on whether they make the compromises necessary to seize the better future that is still open to them.

To that end, Khalilzad's goal of hammering out a unity government that includes Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds is still vital. Khalilzad is also pushing for technocrats to run the "power ministries" of interior, defense, and oil, a play to put them above the sectarianism and patronage concerns of the Shiite parties. Arriving at the precipice of civil war might just scare the Iraqi factions into a healthy flexibility. It will be a sign that this is happening if the Shiites agree to dump the ineffectual incumbent prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, in response to Kurdish and Sunni opposition to him.

If Iraq ever descends into a real civil war, we won't have to debate whether it has happened. It will be clear for all to see. The military will dissolve into ethnic factions, and the government will collapse. That hasn't happened, and so declarations of defeat in Iraq--of the sort our founder and editor-at-large William F. Buckley Jr. has made in his column--are premature. That view could ultimately be proven right, but there is no way to know with certainty at this point.

Throughout the Iraq War, NR has tried to temper the rival fatalisms of the Iraq optimists and pessimists. Victory in Iraq has never been inevitable or impossible. The outcome depends, as is usually the case, on the choices made by the players, including us. Even if our influence in Iraq is waning, our commitment--and the specific forms it takes still matters very much. Defeatism will be self-fulfilling.