  The role of monopoles in the confining behavior of compact lattice $QED_3$ is
studied using an adiabatic cooling method. Monopole-antimonopole pairs with
large separation suvive cooling and the presence or absence of such plasma
monopoles provides a useful classification of the lattice gauge field
configurations at large $\beta$. By calculating observables in subsets of gauge
field configurations which contain or do not contain plasma monopoles it is
seen that, in compact $QED_3$, monopoles dominate the long distance physics,
e.g., the string tension, linear confining potential and dynamical mass
generation. On the other hand, the spin-spin interaction is essentially
unaffected by monopoles.
