The alarm bells are ringing in Iraq this summer. I don't agree with Gaaod that it's time to abandon Iraqi democracy. And I don't think the Bush administration should jettison its baseline strategy of training Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. troops. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's trip to Iraq this week carried the implicit message that America's time, money and patience in Iraq are not endless. The Iraqis must step up and find their own solutions.

Wise observers see new cause for anxiety. John Burns of the New York Times suggested last Sunday that an Iraqi civil war may already have begun, in the Sunni suicide attacks against Shiite targets and in the anti-Sunni death squads that are said to have been organized by Shiite militias. Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, wrote a column yesterday, "Preparing for a shipwreck in the Middle East," in which he cautioned: "The American adventure in Iraq -- creative, bold and potentially revolutionary -- threatens to sink under the weight of a Sunni insurgency that has fed off the Bush administration's frequent incompetence in prosecuting postwar stabilization and rehabilitation."

A useful rule about Iraq is that things are never as good as they seem in the up times, nor as bad as they seem in the down times. That said, things do look pretty darn bad right now, and U.S. officials need to ponder whether their strategy for stabilizing the country is really working.

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

What happens in Iraq will depend on Iraqi decisions. One of those is whether the Iraqi people continue to want U.S. help in rebuilding their country. For now, America's job is to keep training an Iraqi army and keep supporting an Iraqi government -- even when those institutions sometimes seem to be illusions. Iraq is in torment, but the Lebanon example suggests that with patient help, its institutions can survive this nightmare.

In this blithe description, fifteen years of carnage and atrocity followed by a further fifteen years of foreign domination was merely a prelude to the hopeful scenes of Martyrs' Square. (Hey, you need martyrs, right?) It's a debatable contention whether the "national identity" of Lebanon survived, though sectarian loyalty certainly deepened. What aren't debatable contentions are that 100,000 people didn't survive, nearly another million were displaced, and one of the world's premier jihadist networks, the still-powerful Hezbollah, was born. These aren't footnotes, and I have a feeling that the participants of the Cedar Revolution would never dream of treating them as such.

So, yes, an Iraqi civil war--which could be as bad as, or even worse than, Lebanon's civil war--really is the end of the debate about whether the decision to invade Iraq was justified. (As TNR editorialized a year ago: "Iraq's political future could well be decided by guns rather than ballots. If another dictator murders his way to power, or the country dissolves into violent fiefdoms, the war will have proved not just a strategic failure, but a moral one as well.") Sure, something would follow a civil war, but our enterprise won't and shouldn't be judged by that far-distant outcome. Instead, it should be judged by the path that led, under U.S. auspices, to widespread sectarian violence.