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Language on Iraq -- when is it civil war?
By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent Tue
Oct 31, 3:06 PM ET
Washington (Reuters) - What do you call a
situation where 3,000 citizens of a country kill
each other every month through bombing, shooting
and beheading? If the country is Iraq, it
depends on who answers the question.
U.S. and Iraqi government leaders are avoiding
the term "civil war," although President George
W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
several generals have said Iraq was "close to,"
"nearing" or "in danger of" civil war.
Experts outside the administration have been
less circumspect.
"Iraq's conflict is now worse than civil war,"
said an October report by the Center for
American Progress, a Washington think tank close
to the Democratic Party.
"The country suffers from at least four internal
conflicts -- a Shiite-Sunni civil war in the
center, intra-Shiite conflicts in the south, a
Sunni insurgency in the west and ethnic tensions
between Arabs and Kurds in the north."
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S.
military operations in the Middle East, told a
Senate committee in August that "the sectarian
violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in
Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped,
it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil
war."
Since then, the death toll from sectarian
violence has risen steadily, as have the number
of insurgent attacks on U.S. troops. From July
to September, 9,200 Iraqi civilians were killed,
according to an October 30 report by the U.S.
Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction.
"In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war," Iraqi
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said a few months
after taking office six months ago.
His predecessor, Iyad Allawi, saw things
differently. "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."
In the latest of a series of reports on Iraq,
Anthony Cordesman, a widely-respected expert at
Washington's Center for Strategic and
International Studies, said this month the level
and sources of violence in Iraq clearly meet a
dictionary definition of civil war.
Ken Pollack and Daniel Byman of the Brookings
Institution think tank, reached a similar
conclusion two months earlier.
"The debate is over. By any definition, Iraq is
in a state of civil war," they said.
NO CIVIL WAR IN MILITARY DICTIONARY
How to officially define "civil war" has been
particularly difficult for the U.S. military.
The U.S. Department of Defense's Dictionary of
Military and Associated Terms has no entry for
civil war and the term is also not mentioned in
a new counter-insurgency manual for the Army and
the Marines.
"It's really a political question," said an army
officer who did not want to be named.
"And where this is debated publicly, it is
mostly driven by politics. War critics make the
point that we (the U.S.) aren't where we thought
we'd be in Iraq, no matter how you describe
what's happening."
Two Democratic senators, Harry Reid and Edward
Kennedy, have called on the Bush administration
to provide quarterly assessments of the extent
to which Iraq is in a civil war to make sure the
facts on the ground match official statements.
Like the military, the U.S. intelligence
community, composed of 16 different agencies,
has not agreed on a common definition either,
officials say. The Central Intelligence Agency's
own criteria are secret.
In terms of casualties, one measure used by
political scientists studying conflict, Iraq
ranks alongside Algeria, Guatemala, Peru, and
Lebanon, all of which have been called civil
wars.
Unlike in Lebanon, where many citizens called
their 15-year conflict "the events," Iraqis have
not so far settled on a common description for
what is happening, although "the current
situation" is often used.
When Reuters Iraq bureau chief Alastair
Macdonald raised the question of terminology
with Ihsan Abudlhadi, owner of Baghdad's main
English-language bookstore and a connoisseur of
Iraqi phrase-making, the reply was:
"We haven't agreed yet whether it's a civil war
or if it's just a mess. No one can really agree
on just what kind of troubles we're having."
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