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Backgrounder: The Implications of 'Civil War' in Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
December 1, 2006

Introduction

Several major media outlets have announced they will now call the conflict in Iraq a civil war. Most analysts agree the war has entered a new phase of violence but disagree whether it qualifies as a civil war. However it is classified, they say the struggle is not driven by ideological considerations, as was the case in Vietnam, as much as by sectarian differences, which more closely resembles past civil wars in Lebanon or Bosnia. There is further disagreement about what the policy implications are if Iraq has descended into a civil war or whether this necessitates a shift in military strategy. Some say it is merely a semantic debate without a major bearing on policy considerations.

Can the violence in Iraq be termed a civil war?

Experts disagree. By definition, a civil war involves an internal conflict between warring factions for political or territorial control of a state and results in at least one thousand casualties. “By any normally accepted definition, this is a civil war and has been for over a year,” says CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Biddle. CFR Senior Fellow Max Boot agrees. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck,” he says. “It seems like a civil war to me. I don’t understand the brouhaha over whether to call it a civil war or not.”

But others, including Phebe Marr, a Middle East scholar and author of The Modern History of Iraq, say the conflict is too “multifaceted and complex” to be labeled a civil war. There is no “lineup of one group on one side and one group on another,” Marr says, but rather “struggles for power within these groups.”

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.