On this question of when we start calling the violence in Iraq a ‘civil war’, the White House and the Pentagon have clearly been holding out for an organized, conventional civil war, with at least semi-organized armies, perhaps even contending governments.
Such a conflict might be broadly similar to civil wars in the United States, Vietnam, Spain and innumerable other countries. Or, given the overlapping ethnic geography of Iraq, it might look most like Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
With the back and forth atrocities over the last week we may be on the cusp of that. But what we seem to moving toward — and perhaps have already been in for weeks or months — is arguably worse than civil war, by this definition. And that’s what strikes me as the shortcoming of the debate over this phrase. Civil war, by most definitions at least, involves some broad level of organization. What we have here is a situation where there is a nominal government (which none of the contending parties seems particularly interested in overthrowing) but in which the country has experienced a complete breakdown of law and order. It’s not so much civil war as a descent into anarchy.
Late Update: Out of curiosity I looked up Merriam-Webster’s definition of ‘civil war’, in the unabridged version, and it has the rather brief and unhelpful “a war between different sections or parties of the same country or nation.”
