Friday, December 15, 2006

The Death of Civility

Here’s a quick policy rant, just to keep my hand in (as they instructed me upon boarding the tram).  It comes from the frustration I feel upon hearing something I think is wrong, thoughtlessly parroted in the media until its wrongness becomes attenuated and, while not “right,” it becomes an obfuscating factor, obscuring actual accuracy and dulling intellectual vigor.  The promulgation of the mispronunciation “nucular” is one example.  The one that’s got my goat right now is the idea that we may be facing a civil war in Iraq.

This seems to be the great debate: are they in a state of Civil War?  Because, if they’re not having a civil war, we can help them establish peace - but if civil war has broken out, we are entitled to impose order. Or maybe, to advise in the imposition of order by one faction against another.  Actually, maybe it means we should butt the hell out and let the victims of our benevolence fight it out among themselves.  Nobody seems to have a really good consistent position on what it means if they’re having a civil war in Iraq.  And really, I think it’s totally beside the point - because just using that phrase “civil war” seems intellectually dishonest to me.  You can’t have a civil war without a central authority - the “state” - against which the war is fought, and in Iraq, there is no such central authority. The state, if it ever existed since we took out Sadaam, has failed. 

A “state” is a phenomenon of political theory, and I draw heavily on Wikipedia for some of the following details: A state is a set of institutions that possesses the exclusive legitimate authority to make the rules that govern the people in one or more societies, having internal and external sovereignty over a definite territory. The state includes such institutions as the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, courts, and police.  Super-sociologist Max Weber defined it as “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

There are four main theories of what constitutes a “state”.  Marxist theory sees the state as the apparatus for managing the common interests of the bourgoisie, which will wither away once the need for protection of “private” interests is obviated.  Pluralist theory suggests that the state is just the neutral forum in which competing viewpoints apportion (compete for) power.  The constructive theory of statehood says that a state is formed when certain requirements are met, such as a permanent population, a defined territory, government, capacity to enter into relations with other states.  Finally, institutionalist theory suggests that a state is the institutions that comprise it - legislative bodies, providers of services, judicial and prosecutorial bodies, each of which possesses physical assets, tenured incumbents, budgets and constituencies, and is inextricably insinuated into the lives of those it ostensibly serves.  In this theory, a state can be equated with the objects and people who constitute its tangible expression. 

That’s a nice broad philosophical range we’ve got there.  From Weber’s crude mechanistic definition to the touchie-feeley utopianism of pluralists and back to the simplistic tautology of institutionalism, there’s a lot of ways we can conclude that a given population in the world lives in a “state” (as opposed to a colony or a province or a dependent subdivision or if they’re just wild natives in a state of nature ("free for the taking")). 

Let’s compare these theories with what we’ve got in Iraq.  Certainly, under Sadaam there was central authority, law and order, and territorial unity.  All power flowed from Sadaam, who governed absolutely in internal matters and spoke for the nation on external affairs.  He maintained a functioning judiciary, internal security forces, army, and diplomatic corps.  The population was stable, excepting massacres.  Ordinary Iraqi citizens did not enjoy equal access to the rights and privileges that favored individuals received, but there was a structure in place and no one was fool enough to rock the boat.  The brutal suppression of all unfavored voices was itself proof of a vigorous (though fascisticly undemocratic) state. 

Now, we have now: There is a government that sits in Bagdhad.  I’m not sure what its status is at present but it clearly can’t control what’s going on inside the country.  Without wading through reams of depressing news releases, I know there’s been dreadful looting, graft, kickbacks, misappropriation, and theft of reconstruction funds - by all sides, though the point is that the Iraqi government is obviously incapable of doing anything to stop it.  Iraq now has the fastest-growing refugee population in the world, its displaced populations running from destroyed homes, threats of violence, religious extremism, and economic ruin. 

The city of Bagdhad does not enjoy civil order; neither do any of the other major cities in the nation.  Murders, mayhem, bombings and torture-executions are perpetrated on a daily basis by an ever-expanding list of malefactors.  Some seek political gain, some seek spiritual goals, some seek revenge or money or maybe they just want to satisfy the blood lust that we see in the school shootings and highway sniper attacks and serial murders of prostitutes that we civilized avatars of western culture still seem to endure. 

I don’t pretend to know why there is so much killing going on in Iraq, but I’m pretty sure that there is no single reason for it.  For comparative purposes, we could look at all the killing going on during the US Civil War, and we’d see most of the deaths were battle-related or otherwise martial.  Our War of Independence was a civil war - and it was not distinguished by random bloodshed in all the cities for no discernable purpose.  I’m no expert in this area of history, but has there ever been a civil war declared to exist on the basis of widespread unfocused mob violence without the presence of identifiable opposing forces clashing for specific geopolitical gains? 

If you check good ol’ Wikipedia on the subject of Civil Wars, you’ll find something along the lines that “A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight against each other for the control of political power. Political scientists use two criteria: the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second criterion is that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.  Some civil wars are categorized as revolutions when major societal restructuring is a possible outcome of the conflict. An insurgency, whether successful or not, is likely to be classified as a civil war by some historians if, and only if, organized armies fight conventional battles. Other historians state the criterion for a civil war is that there must be prolonged violence between organized factions or defined regions of a country (conventionally fought or not).”

Okay then, we’ll just apply this to Iraq and see if it fits.  I don’t think it’s fair to say that Kurds, Sunnis and Shiia represent the same culture, society or nationality - the Kurds are ethnically and linguistically diverse, and the Sunni-Shiia rift has been a political fact for almost a millenium.  You can say all the fighters are from the same “country,” in that they’re all in Iraq, except for the significant influence of border-crossing agitators and footsoldiers who are fighting as spiritual mercenaries on behalf of leaders with political agendas.  I am not clear that the purpose of the fighting is to control “the political center,” whatever that means.  I don’t think anybody can really say definitively why they’re all fighting.  It’s clear that well over 1,000 have died in sectarian (and criminal) violence, but I can’t say that it represents “100 per side” because I can’t say what the “sides” are, and most of the deaths are random victims of mass destruction, not members of any “side” at all. 

Iraq may be looking at a potentially major social restructuring, so once the dust settles this fighting might be deemed a revolution - but it will be a long, long time before a “victor” could install a social structure to fulfill the role of a “state,” however we define it.  And this insurgency, as our leaders so often refer to it, does not consist of organized armies or conventional battles.  If you can say the factions in conflict are “organized,” this might support the application of the term “civil war” - but I really think the factions are not organized because there are innumerable factions right now, fighting alongside and against purely criminal and anarchic elements. 

If we get to a point where the country is completely divided between Kurds, Sunni and Shiia, and the fighting is pretty much limited to establishing their respective rights and borders, then we could probably invoke the phrase “civil war” without bending it too much.  But unless someone can lay out the organization of the factions now “warring” with each other, I think there is no basis for calling this a civil war.  There is no effective state against which to fight, and no organization among the fighters, logistically or philosophically.  It’s a goddamn mess, is what it is. 

We in the US have gotten sloppy with our use of the word “war” ever since Viet Nam. Congress never declared that one - it was an executive police action.  Same for Grenada.  I don’t know if we ever actually declared war in 1991 against Iraq, but we definitely didn’t in 2003.  Congress authorized the use of force, that’s all.  We call it a war but it’s an executive action.  Similarly, I keep hearing people calling what’s going in in Iraq a civil war.  I don’t think so.  I don’t even think it’s a war.  I definitely don’t think it’s civil - quite the opposite, it seems that the violence is designed only to destroy order, not to replace it with anything better. 

And most importantly, there is no state against which to fight a civil war: there is no accepted central authority that controls anything throughout Iraq.  Iraq cannot engage in international relations because it cannot fulfil its own duties to its citizens, much less to the international community.  The courts are in thrall to violent fringe groups that execute their own judgment in the streets.  Nothing works.  Children cannot go to school; mothers cannot shop for food.  Risk and death are everywhere.  What was once the nation of Iraq is now, I think, truly a failed state.  The fighting that’s going on there now is the free-for-all that results from a power vacuum. 

We saw it in the Balkans; we see it in Sudan.  There is no reason to put Iraq in a separate category.  Except, of course, it would be an admission that we really screwed the pooch on this one.  And of course, it would be an invitation to all violent factions in the region to increase their efforts at destabilization.  But really, they don’t need to be encouraged, any more than a boulder needs to be instructed how to roll down a mountain.  Eventually it will find its senseless destructive way to the bottom, and whatever you are calling it, you had better get the hell out of its way.