With the destruction of the shrine in Samarra this week, there’s no question about how serious the situation is in Iraq. William F. Buckley, who, it must be said, has been anything but optimistic these last couple of years about the effort to create democracy in Iraq, bluntly says today that it didn’t work.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven’t proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren’t on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are “Zionists.” It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each other’s throats.

Victor Davis Hanson, who has just visited Iraq, has a different view.

Who will win? The Americans I talked to this week in Iraq – in Baghdad, Balad, Kirkuk, and Taji – believe that a government will emerge that is seen as legitimate and will appear as authentic to the people. Soon, ten divisions of Iraqi soldiers, and over 100,000 police, should be able to crush the insurgency, with the help of a public tired of violence and assured that the future of Iraq is their own – not the Husseins’, the Americans’, or the terrorists’. The military has learned enough about the tactics of the enemy that it can lessen casualties, and nevertheless, through the use of Iraqi forces, secure more of the country with far less troops. Like it or not, the American presence in Iraq will not grow, and will probably lessen considerably in 2006, before reaching Korea-like levels and responsibilities in 2007.

The terrorists, whom I did not talk to, but whose bombs I heard, answer back that while they fear the Iraqization of their enemy and the progress of democracy, they can still kill enough Shiites, bomb enough mosques, and stop enough rebuilding to sink the country into sectarian war – or at least something like Lebanon of the 1980s or an Afghanistan under the Taliban.

It is an odd war, because the side that I think is losing garners all the press, whether by blowing up the great golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, or blowing up an American each day. Yet we hear nothing of the other side that is ever so slowly, shrewdly undermining the enemy.

RWB is neither a classical historian who just visited Iraq, nor the grandaddy of the modern American conservative movement. Yet my two cents is that it’s too soon to declare that “all is lost,” and indeed that it’s exactly the wrong moment to do so. Like the elections we’ve already seen, this is yet another pivotal moment: the forces who wish to precipitate an anarchy that they can exploit have detonated what amounts to their doomsday weapon, in destroying the revered Shiite shrine in Samarra. It was perhaps inevitable that, faced with their own creeping obsolence and defeat, they would play a card as unthinkable as this. There is probably nothing more inflammatory they could do, short of kidnapping al-Sistani and beheading him on videotape.

If this does not precipitate a civil war, then it’s hard to see what will.

There are alternately ominous and somewhat more hopeful posts from some Iraqi bloggers too.

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