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

Read more: George W. Bush, Iraq, Spin, Opinion, Civil War, Juan Cole

March 23, 2006 | Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi shocked the Washington political establishment on the eve of the third anniversary of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq by declaring that the country is in the midst of a civil war. He observed, "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." Allawi, an ex-Baathist and longtime CIA asset whom Washington installed as interim prime minister, is anything but squeamish -- which is one of the reasons the Bush administration selected him in the first place. But Allawi's tough-guy stance is no longer welcome stateside. His remarks were greeted coldly by the White House and the Pentagon, which loudly proclaimed that Iraq is in the midst of no such thing.

In contrast, George W. Bush said at a news conference on Tuesday, "We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war."

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.

To prevent this from happening, Bush has been giving speeches and answering public questions, attempting to spin Iraq as a budding success story that just needs a little more time (along with the unstated further half-trillion dollars, and a few thousand more dead Americans) to succeed. Beyond that, the Bush administration has tried to reassure Americans that if Iraq did slip into anarchy, the U.S. wouldn't get drawn in. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld startled and dismayed many Iraqis by announcing that if Iraq did fall into what he called civil war, Iraqi forces would have to deal with it, while American troops stayed on the sidelines. During the sectarian disturbances after the al-Askari shrine bombing in Samarra, many thought U.S. troops had orders to remain in their barracks, lest they be sucked into the communal violence.

Allawi, once the Bush administration's pet, is dangerously off message. He warned in a BBC interview that Iraq is rapidly moving toward "the point of no return," and subsequent dismemberment. He added, "It will not only fall apart but sectarianism will spread throughout the region, and even Europe and the U.S. will not be spared the violence that results." The image of Iraq as a sinking ship heading straight for a waterfall that will smash it and the whole Middle East to smithereens is the opposite of the hopeful rhetoric crafted by Bush to meet the Duke professors' specifications.

The real question for politicians like Allawi is not whether Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, but whether it is politically more useful to sound an alarm or to downplay the seriousness of the situation. Allawi, as a representative of the Shiite (and some Sunni) urban middle and upper middle classes in Baghdad and Basra, sees the old Iraq he knew as a young man slipping away. His National Iraqi list garnered only 9 percent of seats in parliament in the Dec. 15 elections, as he saw himself outmaneuvered by fundamentalists of various stripes, including Shiite ayatollahs and Sunni Arab clerics. He therefore wishes to signal that the status quo cannot hold, that sectarianism is the biggest danger, and that only his brand of secular Iraqi nationalism can hope to hold the country together. It is a plea for a minority government under his leadership, with the clear message that Iraq needs a strongman like himself to avoid chaos.

At some early point after the fall of Saddam, if the U.S. had done everything right instead of everything wrong, it is possible -- though by no means assured -- that a secular strongman like Allawi (in effect a cleaned-up Saddam) could have held the country together. Now, it is almost certainly too late. The sectarian genie has been let out of the bottle, and getting it back in is probably not possible.

That there should be a political controversy over whether there is a civil war in Iraq is a tribute to the Bush administration's Orwellian attention to political rhetoric. By the most widely accepted social science measure, Iraq is incontestably in a civil war.

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.)

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