Iraq: UPI Says It’s A Civil War
by tristero
Seems a reasonable conclusion to me. What makes naming it so important is that it would help articulate what an approriate US and international policy should be towards Iraq.
Please note: “would help.” That assumes a competent US administration, or even merely an administration with a toehold on reality. Since we have neither, whether we call the situation in Iraq a Civil War or just the absolute, tragically worst of the many fuckups that Bush directly created doesn’t seem to make much difference right now. Nothing rational will get through to them and the horrible truth is both Iraq and the rest of the world will just have to wait out the Bush presidency for things to have even a hope of being adressed in a sensible fashion. Maybe in 2009, when he’s gone, it will matter more what we call the civil war. But by then, what’s going on over there could have spread out into something far larger:
Despite President Bush’s repeated denials, the figures are clear: 900 sectarian killings in a single month in Iraq means a civil war is well under way.
Iraq is a nation of 25 million people. In the United States, that level of killing would proportionately equal almost 11,000 people killed in riots, reprisal killings and sectarian clashes in a single month.
By comparison, the 30 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998 saw 3,600 people killed in a small population of 1.5 million. Proportionately, that would equate to 60,000 dead over 30 years in Iraq, or 2,000 killed per year. Instead, if the current Iraqi violence simply stays at the current level and does not escalate any further, it will take 10,800 Iraqi civilian lives this year. That rate would be more than five times the average rate of the Northern Irish conflict.
The rate of killings in Iraq is already as bad as during the horrendous 1975-1991 Lebanese Civil War, in which 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed over 16 years — an average of between 9,375 and 12,500 people were killed there per year.
These comparisons, of course, can be misleading because in those conflicts, as in almost all civil wars, the rate of killing is not uniform but explodes in peaks and then settles down at lower levels for long periods of time.
But the comparisons are unfortunately revealing in another way — once the kind of polarizing aimless cycle of sectarian retaliatory killings between paramilitary forces in the two communities that have lived together for many centuries begins, it is often impossible to end it for decades, or before hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or, as was the case in Lebanon, both disasters have happened.