This is my first post on WoC since being invited to join. I've been somewhat reluctant to participate until now partly because I have such great respect for the level of discourse that goes on here, and partly because I'm undergoing momentous changes in my personal and professional life. But Armed Liberal's post about Juan Cole's attempt to politicize and cheapen the term "Civil War" finally got me back to my ergonomic keyboard.
I don't really have that much to say, but the gist of it is that the meaning associated with the term "civil war" has undergone an astounding transformation since John Aubrey used it in Brief Lives to describe the "Civil Warre" precipitated by Oliver Cromwell. It was this war that both halted and transformed the militant radicalization of Protestantism, taming it and turning it into the "Spirit of Capitalism" that became the engine transforming the United States and bringing the "Whig Rebellion" to its fulfillment. And that war also inoculated England against the virus of absolutism that eventually set the Continent grovelling in it's own gore, launching the French Revolution (the mother of all modern totalitarian movements, including Al Qaeda).
The term "civil war" is being cheapened (as A.L. suggests) in much the way that the Left cheapened the term "terrorism," by applying it to almost every sort of conflict that results in civilian deaths. But what I find fascinating is that in his seminal book How To Think About War and Peace (published during WWII) Mortimer Adler suggested that "Wars of Secession" (the only kind of civil war that was recognized at the time) were so rare that he didn't consider them a significant exception to his theory about the cause of war. After WWII civil wars became more and more frequent, as part of the complicated ideological contest that defined the age, and also as a reaction to colonialism (which parsed national identity according to its own requirements). There was a kind of geometric progression of a phenomenon that people had only recently considered as rare as the Dodo.
When inevitable factions form over the distribution of wealth and resources they can either reinforce trational ethnic or religious schisms in a society, or else "cross-cutting alliances" can intervene to shred the identity politics of the factionalization engine. What you get ultimately is either Washington or Robespierre.
So the term "Civil War" really just refers to a special case of the larger political, social and cultural phenomenon that prevented democracy from emerging on the European continent until the early 19th Century, and prevented it from stabilizing until the mid-20th: a phenomenon that James Madison correctly identified as factionalism in the Federalist Papers.
We know the cure. The cure is to keep the prizes and rewards of industry open to everyone, so that in order to become successful sovereign individuals from different classes and ethnic groups must learn to cooperate by forming an ever-changing framework of alliances that eventually cuts, shreds and annihilates the old rivalries that must have led us out of Eden.
I think Iraq is in warre, though not a civill warre. My authority is the Philosopher of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes:
During such a warre, man lives in constant fear of violent death because every man is free to act on his passions, whether they be for revenge or hatred or greed. The recent bombings and retaliatory killings in Iraq are not evidence of a disposition to battel, but continuing consequences of the absence of that "common power" to hold men in awe. The U.S. doesn't want to be that power and the Iraqi government isn't ready to be that power.
Hobbes also said:
Historically, the term 'civil war' meant an armed struggle between two (or more) political factions of the same city-state, as in the Syracuse during the Pelloponesian Wars or. more famously, Rome's many civil wars. A 'sectarian' conflict, by contrast, is that between two (or more) religious groups, as in the German Sixty Years' War. This, like the present conflict in Iraq, involved an outside presence, namely that of the Holy Roman or Austrian Empire. The English Civil War, too, unlike our own later American version, involved some degree of sectarianism--and at one point, during the invasian of the Presbyterian Scots army, was tripartite-- as in Iraq today.
So, defining a civil war is difficult but not impossible, and the situation in Iraq does not at present qualify; it is, so far, an armed sectarian struggle, similar to those of the 18th-Century Balkans, for example; another place where centuries of Turkish misrule resulted in the creation of unworkable modern national entities.
Further, the term 'war' itself is defined by some degree of organization. The end-result of Hobbes' 'alle gegen alles' is not civil war, but anarchy.
Thanks for the comments. I don't disagree. I suppose my point is that the issue isn't so much whether there's a civil war, but whether the tendancy to align interests along the natural faultlines of religion and ethnicity are being successfully resisted. "Success" meaning not so much that factional strife has been done away with, but that there are some control rods in the reactor chamber. It appears to me that with the bombing of the Golden Mosque the "insurgents" took their best shot. There are no other symbols that have quite the same apocalyptic meaning for the Shi'a, so if that didn't do it, it may well be that nothing will.