What a Civil War Could Mean
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in WarCharles Krauthammer thinks Iraq is in a civil war and that it has been a civil war for a long time.
By definition that is civil war, and there’s nothing new about it. As I noted here in November 2004: “People keep warning about the danger of civil war. This is absurd. There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side” — the Sunni insurgency — “is fighting it.”
Indeed, until very recently that has been the case: ex-Baathist insurgents (aided by the foreign jihadists) fighting on one side, with the United States fighting back in defense of a new Iraq dominated by Shiites and Kurds.
Now all of a sudden everyone is shocked, shocked to find Iraqis going after Iraqis. But is it not our entire counterinsurgency strategy to get Iraqis who believe in the new Iraq to fight Iraqis who want to restore Baathism or impose Taliban-like rule? Does not everyone who wishes us well support the strategy of standing up the Iraqis so we can stand down? And does that not mean getting the Iraqis to fight the civil war themselves?
Hence the gradual transfer of war-making responsibility. Hence the decline of American casualties. Hence the rise of Iraqi casualties.
Krauthammer supports the war. As does Callimachus, of course. But Callimachus recently wrote that there isn’t a civil war in Iraq. Yet, he made an interesting point in that post:
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.
O.k., so if this is a game of semantics, we can conclude that Krauthammer, knowing that the term civil war is going to stick, is using his time to redefine civil war so that it is a good thing.
But is it a good thing? Hard to say. It’s very likely that we have passed the tipping point where mass sectarian violence was preventable (if it ever was preventable). At this point, the violence will end when one side subdues the other. Either the Iraqi people will rally behind the central, democratic-oriented government or they will rally behind religious and ethnic leaders seeking total dominion over a specific region or the whole nation.
Our job is to give as much support to the central government as we can because, in the long run, a unified democratic Iraq is far preferable than a splintered Iraq incapable of keeping out and perhaps even welcoming in terrorists. Problem is, for a certain number of Iraqis, our very alliance with the central government is reason enough not to support it.
Unfortunately, if we were to pull out we would be all but ensuring the collapse of the central government. Our choices here are not exactly perfect even as they are incredibly important. We certainly have not yet failed. But victory is not yet close. In the end, whether or not we call the current violence a “civil war� is far less important than how we handle the situation.
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March 24th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that people are using “civil war” in a great range of meanings. Some clearly are crafting it to fit the situation, either to include or exclude Iraq, but there’s no reasom to believe everyone is playing a semantic shell game with it.
To my surprise, this seems to be a term (like “liberal” or “conservative”) that is so relative to the user as to be pretty meaningless to define anything in descriptive writing.
In the broadest possible sense, people use it to mean “battles among fellow citizens or within a community” which certainly includes modern Iraq but also the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Other people define it verey precisely in terms of the casualty rate. Which seems to me to describe a scale of fighting, not a type of war.
I had taken it as the proper term to describe a specific kind of internal warfare, between two factions each claiming to be the legitimate government of a region or nation. That situation, common in history, could use a proscribed word or phrase. I thought “civil war” was it.
What’s going on in Iraq today is something I might call religious war. It seems to me closer to Germany in the 1620s than to England in the 1640s; even though both were rooted in religious conflicts, only one is commonly called a civil war.
But, like Michael Yon and some others who have been invoked here, I’m more concerned with how to handle it than with what to call it. I don’t think any of us broadly disagrees with what is happening, only over what to call it.
As to Krauthammer, I did say that I thought the situation in Iraq was within the realm of civil war in November 2004, as he does. He says it’s stayed that way.
I;m starting to agree with the antis that there’s something irksome about phrases like
when used by people who didn’t talk about this as a likely outcome at the start of the adventure.
Yes, of course, Iraq always was a pressure-cooker of ethnic and religious resentments, and it always was possible that when you took the lid off, it would blow up. But I didn’t support the war from the early stages intending to make that happen. It was what we were supposed to avoid by competent management of the situation and with the help of the large segment of the Iraqi people who were secularized and more interested in having a free hand to create a modern nation for themselves.
March 24th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
You are absolutely right that no one sane who supported this war thought civil war was the necessary path. Which is why I think Krauthammer is engaging in a little spin even as he makes some decent points.
Of course, Krauthammer never can resist pompusly mocking those he disagrees with.