A diary wherein I attempt to discern when it is that a war can be described as "civil" in the mind of George Walker Bush, our esteemed President and undisputed leader of the
Coalition of the (unfortunately ever dwindling) Willing. Alas, as you will see dear reader, I fail miserably in my attempt.
But don't let that stop you from reading further.
(cont. below the fold)
As you may know, a trial balloon has been
floated in the mainstream press by the Bush administration claiming that when civil war breaks out in Iraq our President will bring the troops home. The operative word being
when. Well folks, I guess we know what that means -- that
this doesn't equal civil war to Bush:
NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 90 on Thursday near one of Shi'ite Islam's most revered sites, the Imam Ali shrine in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf.
The attack was the bloodiest since July 18, when 59 people were killed by a suicide bomb in nearby Kufa. That attack was claimed by al Qaeda, which has targeted Shi'ites in a bid to inflame sectarian passions and trigger full-scale civil war.
Nor does this statistic represent a civil war is currently raging in Iraq, just a minor sectarian violence issue:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Almost 2,000 bodies were taken to Baghdad's morgue in July, the highest tally in five months of rising sectarian bloodshed which has forced the United States to boost troop levels in the capital to head off a civil war.
Morgue assistant manager Doctor Abdul Razzaq al-Obaidi said on Wednesday that about 90 percent had died violently.
Just for kicks, I thought I'd compare the current level of violence in Baghdad to what happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990's where everyone admitted a civil war/ethnic cleansing was ongoing. Here's what I discovered:
The pre-war population of the former Yugoslavia was about 23.5 million people, or roughly the size of the Iraqi population.
The war lasted from February, 1992 through 1995, or roughly the same span of time as the current conflict in Iraq (a little longer than the the conflict in Iraq, but let's not quibble; Iraq is bound to catch up soon).
The estimated death toll for the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is estimated to be approximately 100,000 people, of which civilian deaths accounted for between 38,000 to 55,000 depending on who's doing the counting. The remainder of the deaths were among "soldiers" however that term was defined by those doing the counting.
Using my meager math skills I divided 100,000 deaths by 47 months (the duration of the Yugoslav conflict by most accounts) and came up with the figure of 2,174 deaths per month during the war in the former Yugoslavia. That was for the entire country. As you can see, it compares favorably to the number of bodies delivered to the Baghdad morgue for the month of July.
Now some will say that the estimates of deaths in the former Yugoslavia were only estimates, and thus don't make for a valid comparison. To that I can only say, the number of bodies delivered to the Baghdad morgue is only a rough estimate of the total number of deaths in the city of Baghdad last month, and the month before that, and the month before that. The United Nations has its own estimate of Iraqi deaths for the first 6 months of 2006: 14,000, or 2,333 per month. So I think my use of the number of bodies delivered to Baghdad's morgue is more than reasonable.
Then again, in the former Yugoslavia it was Christians killing Muslims, and vice versa. Various peoples whose hatred and a thirst for vengeance had lingered for centuries, and which had suddenly been unleashed in a wave of bloodletting. Nothing at all like Iraq.
In Iraq, it is only Muslims killing Muslims. Or maybe not even that. After all, do Sunnis and Shi'ites really count as Muslims? Our President didn't think so, and who am I to argue the point with him? Perhaps that's the difference? If it's just some little known people over here killing, and being killed by, some other little known people over there, does that really amount to a civil war?
Nonetheless, after a certain threshold amount of killing is reached what do you call such a conflict? 2000+ people per month seems to indicate something a little more serious than your garden variety feud, don't you think? I mean 2000 people dying each month out of a population of 25 million equates to 24,000 dead Americans each month, if it was the Good Old US of A that that had been afflicted with these spasms of sectarian violence among our population of 300 million souls, rather than the newly minted, freedom loving democracy in Iraq. And, of course, that doesn't even take into account the hundreds of thousands of refugees that Iraq's "sectarian violence" has created. Something tells me if we were witnessing that level of chaos in America, the term civil war might already have found itself pressed into service to describe the situation.
So, to sum up, the current sectarian strife in Iraq and the war that raged in the former Yugoslavia seemingly have a lot in common, including their respective death tolls. Yet, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia was considered a civil war by all accounts, and the conflict in Iraq is not. At least, not according to the matrix employed by the Bush administration. I guess I'm just not as smart as President Bush and his advisors, because I fail to see the difference, frankly.
This is what I do know, however. When someone in the Bush administration tell you troops will be withdrawn if civil war breaks out in Iraq, you can be damn sure they will never find that conditions in Iraq have devolved into civil war. The bar will just keep getting raised. And Republicans will keep on blaming Democratic critics for Bush's failures in Iraq.
Front paged in a slightly shorter and less snarky version earlier today at Booman Tribune