Even if Iraq is partially a civil war, it is much more than that. Even if you choose (wrongly) to believe Saddam Hussein's regime was irrelevant to global terrorism, global terrorists have staked a major claim to Iraq and its future instability and unfriendliness toward the United States.
But the antiwar crowd can't see through the fog they've created by obsessing on the war supporters' supposed motives. They have never understood that the great majority of supporters didn't perceive Iraq to be a war of choice. Iraq was not a playground for imperialistic, neoconservative experiments in the exportation of democracy.
Most war supporters believed -- reasonably -- that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD and was voraciously seeking more. They believed it represented a threat to the United States and its allies and that its lawlessness and defiance toward the world community had to be dealt with.
They will be quite pleased with a successful "democratic" regime and even hope that it will have a contagious impact on the region. But they didn't primarily base our support of regime change on those goals.
From the beginning, war opponents have overblown the numbers and influence of the "neoconservative," who is just a straw man they've erected as an easy target to attack rather than dealing with the real issues involved.
Regardless of whether Saddam represented a serious threat or whether terrorists cared deeply about Iraq before, Iraq is now an integral part of the global war on terror. We cannot make these truths disappear just by wishing them away. Nor can we end Iraq's relevance to the global war simply by withdrawing our troops and fantasizing away the inevitable disastrous consequences.
Biden & Co. aren't even serious-minded enough to put their legislative money where their mouths are: away from the troops. They insist on hiding behind a meaningless sense-of-the-Senate resolution, to avoid future accountability for their irresponsible advocacy.
Democrats handily recaptured control of Congress, but even with the apparently unpromising slate of Republican presidential hopefuls, Democrats are going to have a very tough time taking back the White House without demonstrating their seriousness (dare I say "gravitas"?) on the war on terror. They cannot vote it out of existence.