Not your average civil war
Posted by Paul
Power Line
Our friends at Real Clear Politics have posted two pieces on whether Iraq is experiencing a civil war. Charles Krauthammer says yes; Ralph Peters says no. The debate matters rhetorically because the term "civil war" connotes a disaster of epic proportions, and certainly something qualitatively worse than internal violence that falls short of civil war.
Whether the situation in Iraq rises to the level of a civil war depends, of course, on how one defines the term. If one defines it as violence between forces within a country for political purposes which produces significant casualties, then Iraq is having a civil war and has been for several years. If one defines it as something comparable to past situations that have been deemed civil wars, then (as I argue below) the answer is different.
I prefer the latter definition. Definitions should be consistent with past usage, especially when the debate arises in the context of one side of a political debate trying to conjure up visions of the horrors associated with past civil wars.
Peters points to past clashes which indisputably constituted civil wars -- our own Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars, and civil wars in China, Yugoslavia and Africa -- and shows that they were vastly different in nature and scope from what is occurring in Iraq. One can also consider clashes that generally were not regarded as amounting to war or civil war. At times in Israel, terrorists have been able to kill people on a regular basis. But this killing was not labeled a war, and had it been conducted by Israeli Arabs instead of Palestinians would not have been considered a civil war. The main missing ingredients were an organized opposition army in Israel and the ability of the terrorists to hold territory there.
But even the existence of an opposition military force capable of holding a town or two until government troops arrive generally isn't considered enough to convert an insurrection into a civil war. These types of situations have existed at various times in places like the Philippines, Peru, and perhaps Bolivia when Che Guevara led local insurgents against the government. Sometimes they persist for years. But to my knowledge, they are not called civil wars.
There are differences between what is happening in Iraq and what occurred in the situations I just mentioned. But Iraq far more closely resembles these insurrections than it does the paradigmatic civil wars Peters cites.
JOHN adds: I agree. A civil war is a species of war. If it isn't a war, it can't be a civil war. A "war" exists when opposing armies take the field; such is not the case in Iraq. What is happening there is not a war, it is terrorism, pure and simple.
What the terrorists are doing in Iraq, they could do here. If terrorists started exploding IEDs along American highways, would we be experiencing a "civil war"? No. The fact that most of the terrorists in Iraq belong to a particular religious faction does not convert their terrorism into war.
Actually, I think this point is an important one. What makes the situation in Iraq difficult is not that a war is going on. There was a war, and we won it easily. The situation is difficult in Iraq precisely because it is not a war, civil or otherwise; it is terrorism, which is far less devastating than war, but much harder to bring to an end. If we can't outlast terrrorists in Iraq, what reason is there to think we can outlast them anywhere else, including here?
powerlineblog.com
realclearpolitics.com
nypost.com |
