While the real and bloody war rages on in Iraq, the Bush administration is locked in its own make-believe war over semantics. Four thousand Iraqis are dying per month, according to the latest figures and we are splitting hairs over the proper term to define the conflict. However, in the era of 24/7 coverage of world affairs, it is hard to put a verbal spin on events that we see unfold with our own eyes. But this administration, whose entire Iraq war effort was based on a string of lies, is still shamelessly trying to pretend that the scope of the Iraqi disaster is something less horrendous than the facts on the ground and the bodies in the morgues.
After the initial euphoria of the swift US military victory and removal of Saddam Hussein, the first inklings of discord were characterized as the "sour grapes" grumblings of disaffected Baathists. Soon, it escalated to acts of terrorism by foreign Al Qaida affiliates whom Bush wanted to fight there rather than here. When it became clear that the blood bath is now mainly due to Iraqi on Iraqi violence, Bush and Co. reluctantly allowed that there was some sectarian violence between Shia’s and Sunnis. How many Iraqis must suffer horrible deaths by shooting, burning and suicide bombings and for how long, before Bush will admit that his immoral war of aggression in Iraq has unleashed a full blown civil war there? No amount of slick word play will alter the body count and the widespread fear and unrest that the country has plunged into.
Is Iraq in a civil war?
Though the Bush administration continues to insist that it is not, a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.
The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.
American professors who specialize in the study of civil wars say that most of their number are in agreement that Iraq’s conflict is a civil war. “I think that at this time, and for some time now, the level of violence in Iraq meets the definition of civil war that any reasonable person would have,” said James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford.
While the term is broad enough to include many kinds of conflicts, one of the sides in a civil war is almost always a sovereign government. So some scholars now say civil war began when the Americans transferred sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government in June 2004. That officially transformed the anti-American war into one of insurgent groups seeking to regain power for disenfranchised Sunni Arabs against an Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and increasingly dominated by Shiites.
Others say the civil war began this year, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a chain of revenge killings that left hundreds dead over five days and has yet to end. Mr. Allawi proclaimed a month after that bombing that Iraq was mired in a civil war. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,” he said…
Some Bush administration officials have argued that there is no obvious political vision on the part of the Sunni-led insurgent groups, so “civil war” does not apply.
In the United States, the debate over the term rages because many politicians, especially those who support the war, believe there would be domestic political implications to declaring it a civil war. They fear that an acknowledgment by the White House and its allies would be seen as an admission of a failure of President Bush’s Iraq policy.
The rest of the New York Times article here.
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