Civil War Or Not?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The War On Terrorism, WarYes.
Former Iraq PM Ayad Allawi: “”It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”
No.
VP Dick Cheney: “I think the assessment that we get from Gen. George Casey, who’s our man commanding in Iraq, from Zal Khalilzad, the ambassador, from John Abizaid, who is the general in charge of Central Command, doesn’t square with that.”
Yes.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel: “I think the former Prime Minister is correct. I think we’ve had a low grade civil war going on in Iraq for the last six months maybe the last year-our own generals have told me that privately George, so that’s a fact.”
I think that last point by Hagel is an important one. Iraq has been heading this way because of decades of resentment, yes, but also the many disagreements between the three about how to run the country. In fact, Rumsfeld was trying to dispel civil war rumors last August.
So do you think it’s turning into a civil war? Or is this just a media invention?
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March 20th, 2006 at 5:19 am
“The media” rarely invent anything. There is usually some element of truth in everything they report. However, you already know that. Do you think we are stupid? Some of us are. As stupid as we are, we still know you are more stupid than us. If you were smarter, you would not ask such silly questions.
If I was smarter, I would not be posting. I’m not very smart. What is your excuse?
March 20th, 2006 at 5:51 am
Yes, of course, it’s largely a media issue. It’s not a matter of invention. It’s a matter of naming. Nobody outside the media started this debate over “civil war,” or has been exercised about it. Why does it matter so much to the media if it’s a civil war or not? I have my guesses:
1. The media is more concerned than most other entities with finding descriptive terms for things. it’s the nature of the business to be obsessed with the words
2. The pundits need a fresh thing to fight about on Sunday mornings
3. The press is automatically adversarial to the authorities, and is constantly probing for words and terminology not being used by the White House, and then printing them, to satisfy its anxiety not to be lulled by propaganda. First it was “quagmire,” but that didn’t stick, then it was the wholesale switch from “terrorists” to “insurgents” and even in a few cases “freedom fighters;” then it was whether to call what was going on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo “torture” or something else. That one did stick. This is just the latest round of that war of words. The press has noticed that Bush avoids “war” when talking about Iraq (read the AP coverage today of his speech on the third anniversary), and speaks instead of “liberation.” They want to drag it back to “war,” and if they can make it “civil war,” so much the better, since that undercuts the notion of “liberation.”
4. For three years, we’ve been running headlines like “violence worsens,” “security deteriorates,” “Iraq on the brink.” And it’s starting to look silly (like the “Franco still dead” gag from the original “Saturday Night Live”) because we have been writing it downward for so long, but the results continue to be a mixed bag of things getting better, things getting worse, things getting worse then better, and things just plain changing. Rather than admit the narrative has been too pessimistic all along, if we can claim the ability to now say, “it has become a civil war,” all that down-writing will be justified.
Is it really a civil war? First, the media doesn’t care. It’s latched on to those two words and started the tug-of-war, and eventually it will win. Because it cares more about claiming the word than anyone else does. The media applies “civil war” indiscriminately to conflicts that it thinks are civil wars but aren’t — the break-up of the old Yugoslavia in 1990, for instance — but not to others that are more deseving of it — the Rwanda war of 1998, for instance.
To really be a civil war, you have to have sections or factions of a country competing to be the government of that country, and putting forth claims to legitimacy. (The American Civil War really was not a civil war; the Russian Civil War was). But for the moment, Iraq doesn’t have that. It has a feckless government representing all factions, and it has an occupation, resisted by an insurgency, overlaid atop sectarian gang warfare, against a background of general tribal squabbling and heavy organized crime, and rankled by Islamist terrorism pursuing its own goals in the country.
It’s a mess, but every mess isn’t a civil war. Really, Iraq faced something more like a civil war in 2004, when al-Sadr in Najaf and Zarqawi in Fallujah had set up self-governing fiefdoms and there was no functioning, popularly chosen, constitutional Iraqi civilian government in Baghdad.
March 20th, 2006 at 9:25 am
I agree with much of what Cal writes above. I disagree that the media is automatically adversarial to authority. The media now includes Fox, which is servile to this authority. The rest of the media is only occasionally and intermittently adversarial. Media and government poo bahs attend the same parties, live in the same neighborhoods, are members of the same economic class. The media has long since surrendered the independence they would need to be really adversarial.
I’m less interested in the technically correct definition of a civil war. What people mean by the term, I think, is something like our own civil war: major battles between opposing factions within one country, in this case Iraq, as opposed to battles between countries. (Yes, our civil war was a war of secession, even a war of independence, but that’s not the issue when it comes to the practical definition from the point of view of American voters.)
I don’t think we’ve hit either Cal’s threshold, or mine. I think if this becomes a civil war we’ll know it. It could certainly get there, but right now it looks more like bleeding Kansas than Antietam. A precursor to civil war, maybe, but we aren’t there yet.
March 20th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
We’ll have to have this argument sometime. It will be fun. It’s a classic case of the victors writing the history. The South did not want to be part of the United States anymore. It wanted to leave. That’s not a civil war. The North said it was, because the Soiuth never was technically out of the union, and the fight was between factions within the United States battling over “whether the United States is the type of government the South can up and leave.” Which seems to me to be a real stretcher.
I almost don’t think of Fox News as part of the media; that’s a reflex, not a judgment; Fox has been so thoroughly blackballed by the rest of the fraternity, so denigrated and despised, that to introduce it again as an example of a balancing force within the media is ludicrous, from the point of view of one within the media. We can’t embrace it and reject it at the same time.
As for the rest of the media not being obsessed with “speaking truth to power,” I can only think the difference in what we see is the difference between the media’s self-image and its actual performance.
March 20th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Cal:
If we start in on the Civil War you realize we’re looking at a string of comments extending for weeks? I’m for it, but we should both make sure we’ve cleared our schedules.
March 20th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
Probably need a whole new blog for it.
March 20th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Whatever you do, keep it civil.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:48 am
The “War of Northern Aggression”, don’t you mean?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
March 21st, 2006 at 11:04 pm
What is a civil war? It is something that can be a little difficult to define. But by most definitions that I have seen, the situation in Iraq is a civil war.