Civil War Is Here

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, looking grim at a Pentagon news conference on Monday, remains in denial. “Do I think we’re in a civil war at the present time? No,” he said. The Department of Defense is war-gaming a civil war, he told reporters. What would a civil war in Iraq look like? Well, said Rumsfeld, “I will say, I don’t think it’ll look like the United States Civil War.”

Rumsfeld is right about that. It won’t. But it will look a lot like the civil war that is being waged in Iraq today. And that one looks very much like the Lebanese civil war, the grinding, 1975-1990 conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead. To understand what the Iraqi civil war is, think Lebanon.

For a long time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it made sense to argue that the fighting in Iraq was not a civil war, but a Sunni-led insurgency against the U.S. occupation forces and the series of transitional, interim and “permanent” puppet governments supported by those U.S. forces. For a long while, the majority of those killed in Iraq were either combatants on one side of these battle lines or another, or they were civilian “collateral damage” killed by the United States or who died in spectacular car bombings and other terrorist acts carried out by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s religious right. That is no longer the case.

Sometime over the past twelve months—long before the demolition of the Golden Dome in Samarra—that balance shifted dramatically. It might truly be said that the Iraq War became the Iraqi Civil War when the number of those killed in sectarian and ethnic clashes, in death squad activity and in assassinations, torture and executions surpassed the number killed in the war between the United States and the resistance. It’s hard to say exactly when this happened, but it took place last summer, at least, and it has continued to this day.

tags: iraq  war