Rumsfeld weighs in:
Q: Is the country [Iraq] closer to a civil war?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don’t know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different.
Well, at least it seems to be keeping him up at night.
Nicholas Sambanis of Yale in a recent NYT op-ed:
Depending on the criteria used, there have been about 100 to 150 civil wars since 1945. Iraq is clearly one of them.
Many people might have a narrowly construed idea of what constitutes a civil war based on familiar examples, like the American Civil War. Civil wars, however, actually vary widely.
[…]
…if the term “civil war” seeks to convey the condition of a divided society engaged in destructive armed conflict, then Iraq sadly fits the bill.
[…]The insurgents have been fighting continuously, violence affects all sides and there have been more than 30,000 civilian and military deaths, dwarfing the median number of 18,000 deaths for all civil wars since 1945.
[Note: I’m not going to debate Sambanis’s numbers. I’m merely highlighting his unassailable point.]
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