In Foreign Affairs: "Iraq's Civil War," Stanford professor James Fearon's assessment of the conflict in Iraq:

"In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq," writes Fearon, "one comparable in important respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions. Those cases suggest that the Bush administration's political objective in Iraq -- creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops -- is unrealistic. Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost regardless of whether the administration goes with the ‘surge' option, as President George W. Bush has proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group."

Even if sending more troops lowers the violence in Iraq, writes Fearon, history suggests that we'll be have to stay in Iraq for decades. "The more likely scenario," says Fearon, "is that the Bush administration's commitment to the ‘success' of the Maliki government will make the United States complicit in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing."