I'm sure Bush will demand that this man be fired

He's too intelligent, educated and he said the no-no word: civil war:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Biddle, you just returned from a four week stay in Baghdad where you had been asked to advise General Petraeus, the commander of American forces in Iraq. Did you come back with a sense that he has a workable idea on how to improve the situation in Iraq?

Stephen Biddle: I am very impressed with the general's ability. I think he is an extremely able public servant. If anyone is able to make the best of this, it's him.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: General Petraeus is known to be an expert in counter insurgency. In fact the entire administration seems to think that this should be the focus. You on the other hand have argued that counter insurgency is not what is needed in Iraq. Why?

Biddle: A classical ideological insurgency is a war of ideas in which a sub-national group is challenging the ideas by which the government runs the country. In this kind of war of ideas, you can in principle win by changing people's ideas. Given that, the classical strategy for waging counter insurgency is oriented around winning hearts and minds. You engage in a process of political reform in which you introduce democracy to make the government's ideas legitimate. You engage in a campaign of economic development assistance. And you try and train an indigenous military to wage the war. All those strategies are what the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq has been. They make some sense, if the problem you are trying to solve is a classical ideological insurgency. Except, Iraq is not.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What is then?

Biddle: It's a communal civil war in which the war is not fought over a set of ideas. Rather, it is about the survival and self interest of communal groups within the nominal state. Sunnis are not fighting for an idea of what's best for all Iraqis; they are not trying to persuade Shiites that a Sunni government would be good for them. They are fighting for the self interest of Sunnis against the self interest of Shiites -- and vice versa. Because it is not a war of ideas you cannot expect to win it by changing people's minds. It's a war of identity. Identities can't change in the way minds can.

He doesn't see leaving Iraq anytime soon, though, on moral grounds. In his mind, we have to stay and police the cease-fire. With the delicate balance of power between Shia and Sunni, an overbalance in anything could mean extermination:

With respect to the power sharing compromise, the problem is that the stakes for each side are literally existential. They are afraid that if the other side gets control of the state the result might be genocide. The kind of compromise the playbook calls for by definition implies ceding power -- thus compromising with people who you think are threatening you with genocide. If you miscalculate and give up too much power, the result is extermination. So the downside risk is cosmic. By contrast, refusing to compromise means to have an ongoing, chronic low level bloodletting, which isn't great -- but probably looks a lot better than genocide. So we have a recipe for stalemate.

Stalemate = ongoing, chronic low level bloodletting = quagmire. Lovely.