Juan Cole-Bush Denying Iraq Civil War, but Facts Contradict Him

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/23/civil_war/index.html

Civil war? What civil war?
Desperate to convince voters we're winning, Bush is denying that Iraq is having a civil war. But the facts contradict him.

By Juan Cole

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There is no great secret about why Bush is so eager to deny that Iraq is in a state of civil war. He knows only too well that the moment Americans come to believe that Iraq is in a civil war, virtually all support for Bush's war of choice will end. As the Washington Post reported nine months ago, Bush's domestic political spin on the war is guided by the work of two Duke University political scientists, Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. They argue that the U.S. public will only support wars if it believes the mission will succeed. Public support for the Iraq war has faltered because the American people cannot see progress toward a well defined goal and toward success. If Iraq really has fallen into civil war, there is obviously little hope for victory, and Americans are not going to want to go on spending $60 billion a year on a failed enterprise.

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J. David Singer and his collaborators at the University of Michigan (where I also teach) have studied dozens of such conflicts and have offered a thorough and widely adopted definition of civil war. It is:

"Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)

The definition focuses on three main dimensions of civil war: that it is fought within a country rather than between states; that it is fought between insurgent forces and the state; and that the insurgent forces offer effective resistance.

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the conflict shifted from resistance against an occupation to civil war. I disagree that this shift has occurred. However perhaps, given that there is some collaboration between shiite factions and occupation forces, it is a mixture of both a resistance and a civil war. Unlike vietnam, this time our occupation army is aligned with the majority faction, at least for now. Of course an alignment with the shiite side of things is precarious at best, and there is that other large shiite theocracy right next door that perhaps has a better claim to the allegiance of the Iraqi shiites that we do. Basically our position is not good and the plan appears to be to govern the green zone and the 14 other huge military bases and let the rest of the country continue its 15 year disintegration while we threaten other nations in the region with a similar fate.

in parts of Baghdad. There is really no way to argue that a competitive government is aimed at the occupation forces. Rather it is a direct challenge to the existing Iraqi government.

http://www.dailymuslims.com/index.php?option=com_conten...

Robert Fisk: Somebody is Trying to Provoke a Civil War in Iraq
TONY JONES, Reporter of an Australian TV

Friday, March 03, 2006

"The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities."-Broadcast: 03/02/2006 ABC - Australia - Lateline

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ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I listened to Bush. It made me doubt myself when I heard him say that. I still go along and say what I said before - Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society. People are intermarried. Shiites and Sunnis marry each other. It's not a question of having a huge block of people here called Shiites and a huge block of people called Sunnis any more than you can do the same with the United States, saying Blacks are here and Protestants are here and so on. But certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration. Mr Bush says, "Oh, yes, sure, I talk to the Shiites and I talk to the Sunnis." He's talking to a small bunch of people living behind American machine guns inside the so-called Green Zone, the former Republican palace of Saddam Hussein, which is surrounded by massive concrete walls like a crusader castle. These people do not and cannot even leave this crusader castle. If they want to leave to the airport, they're helicoptered to the airport. They can't even travel on the airport road. What we've got at the moment is a little nexus of people all of whom live under American protection and talk on the telephone to George W Bush who says, "I've been talking to them and they have to choose between chaos and unity." These people can't even control the roads 50 metres from the Green Zone in which they work.

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