No Civil War? Darn!

Mark Steyn gets off a good riff at the expense of John Kerry's dour reaction to the Iraq vote:

To be a truly advanced, sophisticated democracy you need an opposition party that knows how to react to good news by sounding whiny and grudging and moving the goalposts. "The real test is not the election," he declared, airily swatting aside 8 million voters. "The real test is…"

I dozed off at that point, so I'm unable to tell you what moved goalposts the senator inserted. But no doubt they involved, as they always do, the Bush administration needing to "reach out" more effectively to involve the "international community". "International community", by the way, doesn't mean Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles, Japan, India, Fiji, et al but Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, a pantomime horse in which both men are playing the rear end.

But I think Steyn errs when he suggests that Sunday's vote beat back the threat of civil war in Iraq, even though he is quite correct that some critics of Bush fervently hope for just that to happen.

The biggest opportunity for civil war will come as the new Iraqi government takes shape in the coming months. Some players will end up feeling slighted and Iraq's own armed forces will grow in size and in responsibility, a necessary but dangerous step. As they grow the units might either fail to contest various militias or go rogue themselves, both outcomes can be found in the history of nation-building.

Even those possibilities are remote, however, what with U.S. troops on hand to smack down such funny business. So the gravest threat of civil war should be pushed even further into the future, perhaps as the U.S. presence is drawn-down. At some point. Right?

The one thing Sunday's turnout clearly does is remove any possibility that continued terror attacks will be construed as some sort of popular disatisfaction with the government-building process.