Article: Civil War Debate

Update:
BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 — Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said Sunday that Iraq had descended into a civil war that was even deadlier and more anarchic than the 15-year sectarian bloodshed that tore apart Lebanon.

“When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war; this is much worse,” Mr. Annan said in an interview with the BBC.

In making his remarks, Mr. Annan joined a growing number of foreign and Iraqi leaders, policy makers and news organizations who say that Iraq is in the grip of civil war. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said last Wednesday at a conference in the United Arab Emirates that Iraq is in a civil war. A former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said the same last March.

The Bush administration has not characterized the conflict as a civil war.

New York Times
November 27, 2006
Iraq Study Group Weighs Overture to Iran and Syria
Privately, administration officials seem deeply concerned about the weight of the findings of the Baker-Hamilton commission.

“I think there is fear that anything they say will seem like they are etched in stone tablets,” said a senior American diplomat. “It’s going to be hard for the president to argue that a group this distinguished, and this bipartisan, has got it wrong.”

Mr. Bush’s nominee for secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, resigned from the commission after his nomination this month, and was replaced by Lawrence S. Eagleburger, another Republican who once was secretary of state. Mr. Gates has said little about his thoughts on military strategy, other than to express amazement when he visited Iraq with the study group over Labor Day that the administration had let the situation spin so far out of control.

Mr. Bush spent 90 minutes with commission members in a closed session at the White House two weeks ago “essentially arguing why we should embrace what amounts to a ‘stay the course’ strategy,” said one commission official who was present.

Officials said that the draft of the section on diplomatic strategy, which was heavily influenced by Mr. Baker, seemed to reflect his public criticism of the administration for its unwillingness to talk with nations like Iran and Syria.

But senior administration officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, have expressed skepticism that either of those nations would go along, especially while Iran is locked in a confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program. “Talking isn’t a strategy,” he said in an interview in October.

“The issue is how can we condition the environment so that Iran and Syria will make a 180-degree turn, so that rather than undermining the Iraqi government, they will support it.”

King of Jordan warns of ‘three civil wars’
The Financial Times
By Eoin Callan and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: November 27 2006 02:00

The Middle East is on the verge of three civil wars - in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories - King Abdullah of Jordan warned Sunday ahead of crisis talks with US President George W. Bush and the Iraqi prime minister.

The Jordanian king said that “something dramatic” needed to come out of the meeting between President Bush and Nourial-Maliki, prime minister, at the tripartite summit being hosted in Amman this week.

King Abdullah said the US needed to see the “big picture” and pursue a regional solution, indicating his support for American engagement with Iran and Syria in pursuit of an end to worsening violence.

“They need to do it now, because, obviously, as we are seeing, things are beginning to spiral out of control,” he told ABC.

“We’re juggling with the strong potential of three civil wars in the region.”

Engagement with Iran and Syria is widely expected to be a key recommendation from the Iraq Study Group, a congress-mandated bipartisan commission led by former secretary of state James Baker and former Democrat congressman Lee Hamilton.

The commission is expected to meet on Monday for two days of deliberations before delivering its report to the White House in December.

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president of Iran, on Sunday offered to “help” America get out of Iraq, in an apparent response to overtures from interlocutors.

“The Iranian nation is ready to help you to get out of the quagmire - on condition that you resume behaving in a just manner and avoid bullying and invading,” he reportedly said in a speech.

The diplomatic push for a co-ordinated regional approach to the conflict in Iraq is expected to gain momentum when Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, on Monday makes a visit to Tehran for talks on easing sectarian tensions.

President Bush first indicated his administration was ready to consider a radical change in direction of its Iraq policy in the wake of Republican defeats in mid-term elections.

Democrats, emboldened by their sweep of Congress, on Sunday stepped up pressure on the administration to announce a timetable for withdrawing troops.

Congressman Ike Skelton, the incoming chairman of the House armed services committee, called for troop withdrawals to begin within the next year.

It’s a Civil War, Stupid
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, November 27, 2006; 1:02 PM

After nearly four years of letting the Bush Administration set the terms of the national debate over Iraq, some major news organizations are finally calling the conflict there what it is: a civil war. The White House is howling in protest.

Here’s what Matt Lauer announced on NBC’s Today Show this morning: “As you know, for months now the White House has rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into civil war. And for the most part, news organizations, like NBC, have hesitated to characterize it as such. But, after careful consideration, NBC News has decided the change in terminology is warranted -- that the situation in Iraq, with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas, can now be characterized as civil war.” Here’s some video of Lauer discussing the decision with retired general Barry McCaffrey.

NBC’s First Read reports that the response was swift: “The White House is objecting this morning to descriptions of the Iraq conflict as a civil war. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, ‘The violence is primarily centered around Baghdad and Baghdad security and the increased training of Iraqi Security Forces is at the top of the agenda when [Bush and Maliki] meet later this week.’”

NBC is not alone. Here’s Solomon Moore writing in the Saturday Los Angeles Times: “Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before.”

Newsweek editor and columnist Fareed Zakaria writes: “We’re in the middle of a civil war and are being shot at by both sides.

“There can be no more doubt that Iraq is in a civil war, in which leaders of both its main communities, Sunnis and Shiites, are fomenting violence. . . .

“To speak, as the White House deputy press secretary did last week, of ‘terrorists . . . targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government’ totally misses the reality of Iraq today. Who are the terrorists and who are the innocents?”

Edward Wong wrote in the Sunday New York Times: “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.

“They also worry that the American people might not see a role for American troops in an Iraqi civil war and would more loudly demand a withdrawal.

“But in fact, many scholars say the bloodshed here already puts Iraq in the top ranks of the civil wars of the last half-century. The carnage of recent days -- beginning with bombings on Thursday in a Shiite district of Baghdad that killed more than 200 people -- reinforces their assertion. . . .

“’It’s stunning; it should have been called a civil war a long time ago, but now I don’t see how people can avoid calling it a civil war,’ said Nicholas Sambanis, a political scientist at Yale who co-edited ‘Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis,’ published by the World Bank in 2005. ‘The level of violence is so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since 1945.’ . . .

“On Friday, Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman, insisted that the Iraq conflict was not civil war, noting that Iraq’s top leaders had agreed with that assessment. Last month, Tony Snow, the chief spokesman for President Bush, acknowledged that there were many groups trying to undermine the government, but said that there was no civil war because ‘it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader.’”

Harvard professor Monica Toft wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org in July that there are six criteria for considering a conflict a civil war -- and that Iraq had met all six since early 2004.

Here is CNN’s Michael Ware talking to Kitty Pilgrim on Friday:

Pilgrim: “Michael, the Iraqi government and the U.S. military in Baghdad keep saying this is not a civil war. What are you seeing?

“MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, firstly, let me say, perhaps it’s easier to deny that this is a civil war, when essentially you live in the most heavily fortified place in the country within the Green Zone, which is true of both the prime minister, the national security adviser for Iraq and, of course, the top U.S. military commanders. However, for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like.

“This is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back.

“We’re having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We’re seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We’re seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again.

“I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don’t want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn’t one.”