A civil war, by any other name

IN THE NEWS
News items and commentary about Iraq in the last few weeks have echoed the same question: Is Iraq now in the midst of a civil war? The motives behind the question are laudable, but it's the wrong question to ask. If you phrase the question more precisely, you quickly find that, depending on how you frame it, the issue is already moot.

Is it already a civil war for the various insurgent groups, ranging from disgruntled Ba'athists to revolutionary Islamists? Of course it is; the only question in their mind is how well they are doing at their varying goals.

Is the level of violence high enough to qualify as a civil war? This way of phrasing the question implies that there is some sort of minimum carnage requirement for conflicts to be labeled as civil wars. While we might try to craft just such a measure, the history of insurgencies casts a doubtful shadow over the effort. Most insurgencies neither start nor finish cleanly. If you had looked at the Sandinista movement in the early 1970s, you might have been highly skeptical that these hapless guerrillas, given repeated drubbings by the Somoza regime, would ever be able to seize power in Nicaragua. However, in 1979, they did just that, so it would seem fatuous to argue that there was no civil war in Nicaragua prior to the dramatic change of fortunes the Sandinistas exploited in the late 1970s. At the end of civil wars in which the insurgents lose, the insurgency often survives in some form. The same Muslim separatists who fought the American occupation of the Philippines returned to give the Marcos regime a severe fright, and most recently, in their Al Qaeda-allied incarnation, have been a thorn in the sides of both the Philippine and American governments.

Is the level of violence out of control? This version of the question implies that, the more one or both sides in a civil war fail to contain violence, the more dangerous the situation is. However, the level of peril to soldiers and civilians is a poor measure of how close the insurgents are to winning. The widespread devastation of the Thirty Years War, in which an estimated one-third of Germans in the main battleground of the conflict died between 1618 and 1648, failed to engineer a great revolutionary outcome. In fact, the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, merely re-affirmed the prior understandings behind the Treaty of Augsburg. (Both agreements let secular princes decide whether their territory would be official Protestant or Catholic.)

Have we reached a recognizable stage in the natural progression of civil wars that indicates the government is in serious trouble? As I've described earlier in this blog, both practitioners and scholars of revolutionary warfare have defined stages through which the conflict passes. Mao, for example, famously divided guerrilla strategy into three phases. Political scientists like Crane Brinton and Lyford Edwards created their own "etiology" of revolution" to describe the common stages through which the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, the English Civil War, and other conflicts have proceeded. Most of these practitioners and scholars would agree that the Iraqi government is not in immediate danger of falling, since there is no mass mobilization against the government. (Keep in mind, however, that a mobilization against the government, such as the mass demonstrations against the Shah of Iran in 1979, are not necessarily a mobilization for the insurgents—though revolutionaries may seek to capitalize on the chaos created when the regime wavers or falls.)

Has the conflict reached a point where people are forced to take sides? Here, the answer is undoubtedly yes. The bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra appears to be the opening of a new phase in the war, in which the insurgents' attacks are increasingly designed to widen the fissures along Iraq's sectarian fault lines. Just as in Bosnia, where an intermixed population suddenly became polarized along ethnic lines, and in Lebanon, where sectarian tolerance devolved into brutally violent identity politics, the cross-group ties among Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds are rapidly unraveling. The level of interconnection and tolerance was always higher in Baghdad and other major cities than in some of the less populous and developed sections of Iraq, and the Ba'athist autocracy smothered resentments against the Sunnis who dominated the government. Now, in nearly every part of Iraq, the fear that I might be killed, simply for being a Sunni, Shi'ite, or Kurd, has fractured the population in an unprecedented way. The ability of Iraqi politicians to keep politics among these groups continuing at the governmental level is both laudable and helpful in this regard. The deals brokered among Sunni, Shi'ite, and Kurdish politicians may not be enough to hold the country together, if a bullet or bomb reaches a major figure like Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

Does the situation provide more incentives for violent action than more peaceful political means? So far, the Iraqi government and its American patron have been unable to find the carrots and sticks needed to prod the insurgent groups into a settlement. Even the Army of the Mahdi's ceasefire is only that, an agreement to stop attacking the government for the time being. The Mahdists have not demobilized, and could easily resume hostilities whenever they deem it advantageous or necessary.

Is there reason to be worried about the situation, since it has not improved substantially? This question echoes the adage that insurgents don't need to make dramatic progress to win; they merely need to avoid losing long enough for the government to collapse. In this sense, Iraq is clearly in the midst of a civil war—as it has been for three years.

Have the insurgents become more dangerous? It all depends on which insurgents you mean. For example, the Mahdists have fared fairly well, though they may have paid a price for their conspicuousness that other groups have not. The Salafist groups have been more successful in their own secretive way, maintaining a constant level of attacks against high-profile targets, sharpening their methods, and recruiting enough new members to maintain their campaign. Long before the recent escalation in violence and casualties, the insurgents acquired the organization, equipment, technical skill, and strategic know-how to make them dangerous.

Are more people in arms now than before? In a society as heavily-armed as Iraq is, this question might appear ridiculous. However, the phrase "in arms" means more than just "owning an AK-47." When an increasing number of civilians are recruited into insurgent cells, militias, regular military units, and other organized instruments of political violence, the phrase "in arms" acquires a more important and frightening meaning. In this sense, more Iraqis are "in arms" than there were a year ago—ironically, in part, because of the United States' efforts to arm Iraqis. Training and equipping government military and paramilitary units is a vital part of the counterinsurgency effort. In fact, at this point in the conflict, it may be the most important part. (Other efforts may be pointless if the government can't achieve population security in selective regions of Iraq.) Unfortunately, this effort may be backfiring. Just as roadside and suicide bombings are now standard fare in the daily news from Iraq, so too are stories about unexplained killings at the hands of the police or the military. The phrase "death squads" seems to have stuck, especially given the likely motivations behind these killings: revenge, intimidation, and assassination. These killings follow an all-too-familiar pattern in counterinsurgency, where poorly trained, led, and motivated troops resort to political murder out of desperation, frustration, anger, and even darker motives. While assassination of insurgent leaders may have its place in counterinsurgency, this kind of violence ultimately undermines the regime, creating more opposition than acquiescence. The frustrating lack of information on these murders make it hard to gauge the actual amount of danger they represent.

As you can see, the question, Is there now a civil war in Iraq? is somewhat meaningless. It reflects American assumptions about revolutionary conflict, not the realities of the current Iraq conflict. When Americans mouth the phrase civil war, they undoubtedly think of the war between the Union and the Confederacy. In 1861, decades of antagonisms between North and South exploded into armed conflict that in four years claimed more lives than American casualties in all previous wars (and more than any other war after the American Civil War). There was a sudden, disjunctive shift from barely-maintained peace to war, with both sides highly mobilized for an apocalyptic showdown. This is not the script that the insurgency in Iraq is following; therefore, we should phrase the "civil war" question more carefully, to reveal what is actually happening in Iraq today.

Comments

[Joseph]

Yeah everyone thinks trenchs around Richmond and cavalry raids. That isn't always so, at least not anymore.

Could this be called a 4th gen. civil war? I can't say that I totaly understand the term "4th gen. war" but I think I have the basic's of it and this seems to fit though there are still the hallmarks of any civil war involved. I guess there is no black and white about it but shades of gray. Still the fact remains that Iraqi fights Iraqi on Iraq's soil so that seems to me to qualify as a civil conflict.

[ali]

Yes civil war is a problematic term. An American will inevitably imagine Gettysburg just as an Irishman will recall the shelling of the GPO.

The Correlates of War project definition:

"An internal war is classified as a major civil war if (a) military action was involved, (b) the national government at the time was actively involved, (c) effective resistance (as measured by the ratio of fatalities of the weaker to the stronger forces) occurred on both sides and (d) at least 1,000 battle deaths resulted during the civil war."

By this definition Iraq has been in a state of civil war for some time. But as yet we have no rival governments contending for power or attempting to secede, it doesn't look like our civil wars. If only it did; what's happening in Iraq simply isn't as orderly and contained. Unfortunately the Hobbesian chaos that Congo has suffered may be a better model.

Lebanon and Algeria have recently experienced wars with many similarities but retained coherent power structures. We decapitated an Iraqi society already shattered by wars and savage dictatorship and have failed to replace "Le Pouvoir" creating an impotent and dependant regime. Iraq wasn't a sectarian society but is rapidly becoming one as people cling to the wreckage of their civil society: the Mosque and the clan. This is an unstable bomb now sweating nitro; the occupation and insurgency is just the fuse.

We now need to focus on preventing this becoming a regional war, for that's the great risk another Thirty Years War which our weary soldiers will necessarily be in the middle of.

[Barry]

Adding on to that last comment -"Most of these practitioners and scholars would agree that the Iraqi government is not in immediate danger of falling, since there is no mass mobilization against the government."

In the case of Iraq, that might be assuming the wrong status quo. The status quo government was Saddam. The US then removed that status quo, but failed to replace it with anything which the Iraqis or Americans or British would recognize as a government. For the past three years what has stood in for the government is an assortment of US actions (semi-random, done with extreme ignorance, and frequently substituting firepower for anything else); surviving bureaucratic pieces of the government; clan/tribal/religious leaders, and their militias; a nominally Iraqi government which meets in the Green Zone, and has little influence, let alone power, outside that zone of foreign occupation.

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[bang]

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