Civil war. Surely this is an adjectival misnomer of the first rank. Of all of the various types of war, civil war -- that is, a violent conflict waged between opposing sides within a society -- has generally been the least mannerly and the most savage. "By nature without rules of engagement and retaliation, civil war is a cauldron of wanton and unpremeditated violence with little, if any, ideological leaven," historian Arno J. Mayer of Princeton University wrote in The Furies, his masterful account of the civil wars that followed the Jacobin revolution in France and the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia. Why are civil wars inherently brutal? Because, Mayer said in a recent telephone conversation, they are at bottom about "vengeance."
By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality. The principal combatants are drawn from the Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab communities, which together comprise about three-quarters of the Iraqi population of 26 million. In this picture, U.S.-led coalition forces tend to be viewed by "rejectionist" Sunni Arabs as protectors of the Shiites, who dominate the new, U.S.-backed, Iraqi government and who operate militias with close ties to the new Iraqi regime.
The Bush administration does not say that Iraq is in a civil war -- but then again, the administration does not say Iraq is not in a civil war. In the battle of words in Washington over defining the conflict, the White House studiously avoids any use of this ominous-sounding term; President Bush didn't use it in his November 30 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on his strategy for "victory in Iraq." But in the White House's frankest appraisal, to date, of the situation, its new "victory" blueprint acknowledges that Iraqi Sunni Arab "rejectionists," and not Saddam loyalists or Qaeda-linked terrorists, are "the largest group" opposed to the new Iraqi government. This analysis is consistent with the civil-war paradigm of the conflict. Still, the White House prefers to talk about Iraq in the more limited, and less scary, vocabulary of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, months ago began reviewing the question of whether the Iraqi conflict could be seen as a civil war. Back in the spring, Army Col. Bill Hix, then the chief of strategy for multinational forces in Iraq, initiated a conversation with two political science professors at Stanford University about applying the civil-war prism to Iraq. The discussion centered on the questions of how, and how quickly, a low-grade civil war can become full-blown. The Stanford duo, James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, told Hix, who left his position in August, that civil wars have often occurred despite the presence of "foreign stabilization forces," and they encouraged him to look at past civil wars in such oil-rich countries as Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. "I understand that by your metric, we are already in the midst of a civil war," Hix replied to the professors in a May e-mail, "but for reasons that are both operationally convenient and, I also think, valid ... I disagree."
Indeed, focusing the lens of civil war on Iraq omits some aspects of this exceedingly complex conflict. Foreign jihadists drawn to Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers as part of a project to establish a new caliphate in the Middle East are not really civil-war combatants. Still, the civil-war prism can explain a lot -- and also offer some prospective guidance. In the elections set for December 15, Iraqis will choose members of a permanent parliament. And if Sunnis participate widely, the elections could start repairing the hurts between warring factions in Iraq, and thereby reduce the level of violence. But it is also possible, and given the history of civil war, perhaps more likely, for the elections to stoke the flames. Democracy is not an antidote to civil war, because elections in fragile societies are often polarizing. In recent history, civil war broke out after contested elections in several post-Soviet republics; and in the United States, the 1860 presidential election turned out to be a prelude to civil war. Indeed, historian David Herbert Donald of Harvard famously blamed the American Civil War on "an excess of democracy."
The worrisome sign in Iraq is that political parties are already organizing principally along religious and sectarian lines. Moreover, the new Iraqi security forces, including the army, are composed of militia elements that "retain their original loyalties or affiliations," as the Pentagon acknowledged last July in a sentence buried in a generally upbeat report to Congress on "measuring stability and security in Iraq." Such units, if made combat-ready, "might very well turn these very arms against each other," notes Pavel Baev, who is a senior analyst for the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. So, what does history teach about how civil wars end? Baev's answer is not especially hopeful. "A military victory on one side," he replied.
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