[Vision2020] It's Official: Civil War in Iraq

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Catching up on everything after 12 days in Provence, living as close to the 
land (local produce and local wine) as one possibly can.  It was amazing, 
but I'm happy that I'm now returning to 30 minute dinners rather than 2 
hour ones. I ate more butterfat in one week than I have all year.

This article below was written by a political science professor who focuses 
on civil wars.  One key point: the average death toll in civil wars since 
1945 has been 18,000. The toll of Iraqi civilians is now approaching 
50,000, with over 3,000 deaths in June alone.

Although I listed many specific references for my torture column, I'll make 
an even more detailed biography for the stubborn unbelievers on this 
list.  I'll repeat one reference from my column:

In his book "The One Percent Solution," Ron Suskind reports that Bush asked 
CIA chief George Tenet if torture really worked.  Al Qaeda suspect Zubaydah 
was water boarded and he began talking about all sorts of plots, but not a 
single one was verified in a huge waste of resources.

Now I'm off to the Wallowas for 4 days of backpacking.

Nick Gier

July 23, 2006, The New York Times
It's Official: There Is Now a Civil War in Iraq

By NICHOLAS SAMBANIS
Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University

HAS the conflict in Iraq turned into a civil war?

Civil wars are defined as armed conflicts between the government of a 
sovereign state and domestic political groups mounting effective resistance 
in relatively continuous fighting that causes high numbers of deaths. This 
broad definition does not always distinguish civil wars from other forms of 
political violence, so we often use somewhat arbitrary criteria, like 
different thresholds of annual deaths, to sort out cases.

Depending on the criteria used, there have been about 100 to 150 civil wars 
since 1945. Iraq is clearly one of them.

Many people might have a narrowly construed idea of what constitutes a 
civil war based on familiar examples, like the American Civil War. Civil 
wars, however, actually vary widely. They include bloody yet short-lived 
coups (Argentina in 1955); organized civilian massacres by the warring 
parties (Burundi in 1972 and in 1988); guerrilla warfare combined with 
genocide (as in Cambodia and Guatemala); recurrent bouts of factional 
conflict in the military (Central African Republic from 1996 to 1997); 
combinations of criminal and political violence (Chechnya and Algeria in 
the late 1990's); self-determination struggles (Sri Lanka since 1983, 
Bangladesh in 1971 and Sudan from 1983 to 2005, when Khartoum and southern 
rebels signed an accord); or warfare between large, well-organized armies 
(China from 1927 to 1949, El Salvador from 1979 to 1992, Mozambique from 
1976 to 1992, Croatia in 1991, and Angola from 1975 to 2002). Some unlucky 
countries have had combinations of all the above  the Congo is the best 
example.

Sometimes we cannot tell if a civil war has started until long after the 
fact, when a minor conflict that has gone on for years suddenly spikes into 
large-scale violence.

Conversely, it is sometimes hard to know when a civil war ends, as wars can 
turn into long-lasting minor insurgencies, like the conflict between 
Indonesian security forces and the Free Papua Movement.

What's more, civil wars are sometimes limited to peripheral areas (as in 
Uganda's war against the Lord's Resistance Army) or they can engulf the 
whole country, as in Greece (1944 to 1949) or Bosnia (1992 to 1995). In 
some countries  like Chad, Colombia and Myanmar, which have been in and out 
of civil war for more than 40 years  civil war becomes a fact of life 
rather than an anomaly.

The question of whether a country has fallen into civil war is often 
deliberately muddied for political reasons. States avoid using the term to 
play down the level of opposition to them. Thus, for example, the Kenyan 
"shifta" war of the 1960's against secessionist Somalis in the Northern 
Frontier District may have technically been a small civil war, but in the 
historiography of the country and in the minds of many Kenyans, it was just 
banditry ("shifta" means bandit) or a border conflict with Somalia.

But if the term "civil war" seeks to convey the condition of a divided 
society engaged in destructive armed conflict, then Iraq sadly fits the 
bill. Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds together have managed to create 40 or so 
political parties and dozens of militias in two years of sovereign rule.

The insurgency started while Iraq was under foreign occupation, but it 
intensified since the handoff of sovereignty. The insurgents have been 
fighting continuously, violence affects all sides and there have been more 
than 30,000 civilian and military deaths, dwarfing the median number of 
18,000 deaths for all civil wars since 1945.

In addition, sectarian violence is uprooting ever larger numbers of Iraqis. 
On Thursday, the Iraqi government reported that in the previous week alone, 
more than 1,000 families had left integrated areas for Shiite or Sunni 
strongholds.

Fighting a civil war is the way that some societies build a state, and it 
is hard to imagine how there could have been a smooth transition from 
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Still, the United States has clearly helped 
to create the conditions for Iraq's descent into civil war.

Two failures are worth noting. First, a large literature on contentious 
politics has shown that violent opposition groups gain legitimacy and 
public support when the state uses indiscriminate violence or abuses 
civilians. This is precisely what has happened in Iraq, with recent reports 
of civilian abuses by the coalition.

Second, civil war studies have shown that insurgencies grow into large wars 
when insurgents receive external assistance. The American-led coalition 
simply has not had the manpower to quarantine those Iraqis who have 
reportedly received assistance from neighboring countries and international 
terrorist entities.

What can be done? History shows that the one way to build peace after a 
civil war is through a decisive victory  something that's easier said than 
done. Negotiated settlements can also produce a lasting peace, but durable 
settlements like those in Cambodia, Mozambique and El Salvador usually come 
after long wars (10 years on average). And the United Nations can help, but 
only after an agreement has been reached. The United Nations cannot win 
wars, but it can shore up the foundation for a peace.

More than a third of civil wars restart within five years and Iraq has many 
risk factors: a dependence on oil, a population polarized along religious 
lines, meddlesome neighbors, no democratic traditions and a long history of 
violent conflict.

But there is also good news. Iraq is better off than many countries in the 
midst of a civil war: its income is relatively high, it has an educated 
populace and it can count on abundant foreign assistance if fighting ends.

Whether these factors will help to bring an end to the conflict in Iraq is 
an open question.

What is no longer an open question, however, is the nature of the conflict. 
It is a civil war, not an insurgency.

Nicholas Sambanis, an associate professor of political science at Yale, is 
the co-author of "Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace 
Operations."