Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Civil War by the Numbers

Over at Blognonymous, Kvatch addresses the question of whether Iraq is in a state of civil war by doing the sensible thing: comparing the numbers to other civil wars. Short version: Iraq is bloodier than Guatemala's civil war, but probably not as bad as Yugoslavia's.

Just to throw in a couple more data points, there are certainly more people being killed in Iraq than were killed in civil wars in El Salvador (population 6 million or so; 75,000 casualties over 12 years, or 520 per month) or Sri Lanka (population 20 million; 64,000 casualties over 19 years, or about 280 per month), although they all pale in comparison to Nigeria's (population 120 million or so; 1 million casualties over 2 years, or 40,000+ per month). By any reasonable casualty standard, Iraq is in a civil war.

So how do folks like Hinderaker deal with these numbers? By defining them away:

A civil war is a species of war. If it isn't a war, it can't be a civil war. A "war" exists when opposing armies take the field; such is not the case in Iraq. What is happening there is not a war, it is terrorism, pure and simple.
Um...right. See, your Sunni terrorists attack a Shiite mosque, and Shiite terrorists kill a bunch of Sunnis in retaliation...and meanwhile Iraqi families are preparing to fight...but anyone can see, based on a restrictive definition of 'war', that none of this could possibly be considered 'civil war'.

Now, how about all those freshly painted schools?

[That's all, folks]