Two Interesting Pieces on Iraq's Civil War

This morning's Washington Post has two pieces--slightly at odds with each other-- on the topic of Iraq's civil war.

The first, by Caleb Carr--the son of legendary Beat character Lucien Carr--says that we are at the beginning of a civil war, with no chance for the U.S. to do anything about it.

According to Carr:

If Americans ever had the power to stave off such a conflict, the past three years of misguided military policy have exhausted it. But military ability to stop a civil war is not the key issue. Nor should excessive concern for our own national security cloud our policy decisions: The first casualties of any expanded fighting will almost certainly be both Saddam Hussein (who has been kept alive thanks to U.S. insistence on his trial -- and thanks to U.S. guards) as well as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is now despised more than Hussein by many Iraqis. No, the real issue of importance for Americans with regard to any impending Iraqi civil war is: Are we morally justified in trying to prevent it?

Carr says no, we should let them fight it out.

The second piece, by James Fearon, a professor of political science at Stanford, shows that by academic definitions, Iraq's civil war has been going since at least 2004.

For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.

Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).

The semantic battle being fought in Washington since the Samarra mosque bombing over whether or not Iraq is in a civil war is basically a fight over how the war itself is viewed.

If the American public comes to the conclusion that Iraq is embroiled in a civil war, they will realize that the U.S. endeavor in that country has failed.

That's why the administration is vociferously denying the reality of the situation as it becomes more apparent.