Related Resources On NationalJournal.com Insider Interview: Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (12/07/05) · Poll Track: National Polling On Iraq · Social Studies: "Palestine, Not Iraq, Is The Best Shot At An Arab Democracy" (11/11/05) · National Journal Cover Story: "Get A Grip" (9/02/05) · Well-Read Wonk: "Front Lines Of Defense" (6/02/05) Additional Resources On The Web International Peace Research Institute, Oslo · "In the Footsteps of the Martyrs," Slate.com (2/16/05) · "Shiite Militias and Iraq's Security Forces," Council on Foreign Relations (11/30/05)

By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Dec. 9, 2005

Civil war. Surely this is an adjectival misnomer of the first rank. Of all of the various types of war, civil war -- that is, a violent conflict waged between opposing sides within a society -- has generally been the least mannerly and the most savage. "By nature without rules of engagement and retaliation, civil war is a cauldron of wanton and unpremeditated violence with little, if any, ideological leaven," historian Arno J. Mayer of Princeton University wrote in The Furies, his masterful account of the civil wars that followed the Jacobin revolution in France and the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia. Why are civil wars inherently brutal? Because, Mayer said in a recent telephone conversation, they are at bottom about "vengeance."

By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality. The principal combatants are drawn from the Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab communities, which together comprise about three-quarters of the Iraqi population of 26 million. In this picture, U.S.-led coalition forces tend to be viewed by "rejectionist" Sunni Arabs as protectors of the Shiites, who dominate the new, U.S.-backed, Iraqi government and who operate militias with close ties to the new Iraqi regime.

The Bush administration does not say that Iraq is in a civil war -- but then again, the administration does not say Iraq is not in a civil war. In the battle of words in Washington over defining the conflict, the White House studiously avoids any use of this ominous-sounding term; President Bush didn't use it in his November 30 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy on his strategy for "victory in Iraq." But in the White House's frankest appraisal, to date, of the situation, its new "victory" blueprint acknowledges that Iraqi Sunni Arab "rejectionists," and not Saddam loyalists or Qaeda-linked terrorists, are "the largest group" opposed to the new Iraqi government. This analysis is consistent with the civil-war paradigm of the conflict. Still, the White House prefers to talk about Iraq in the more limited, and less scary, vocabulary of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, months ago began reviewing the question of whether the Iraqi conflict could be seen as a civil war. Back in the spring, Army Col. Bill Hix, then the chief of strategy for multinational forces in Iraq, initiated a conversation with two political science professors at Stanford University about applying the civil-war prism to Iraq. The discussion centered on the questions of how, and how quickly, a low-grade civil war can become full-blown. The Stanford duo, James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, told Hix, who left his position in August, that civil wars have often occurred despite the presence of "foreign stabilization forces," and they encouraged him to look at past civil wars in such oil-rich countries as Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. "I understand that by your metric, we are already in the midst of a civil war," Hix replied to the professors in a May e-mail, "but for reasons that are both operationally convenient and, I also think, valid ... I disagree."

Indeed, focusing the lens of civil war on Iraq omits some aspects of this exceedingly complex conflict. Foreign jihadists drawn to Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers as part of a project to establish a new caliphate in the Middle East are not really civil-war combatants. Still, the civil-war prism can explain a lot -- and also offer some prospective guidance. In the elections set for December 15, Iraqis will choose members of a permanent parliament. And if Sunnis participate widely, the elections could start repairing the hurts between warring factions in Iraq, and thereby reduce the level of violence. But it is also possible, and given the history of civil war, perhaps more likely, for the elections to stoke the flames. Democracy is not an antidote to civil war, because elections in fragile societies are often polarizing. In recent history, civil war broke out after contested elections in several post-Soviet republics; and in the United States, the 1860 presidential election turned out to be a prelude to civil war. Indeed, historian David Herbert Donald of Harvard famously blamed the American Civil War on "an excess of democracy."

The worrisome sign in Iraq is that political parties are already organizing principally along religious and sectarian lines. Moreover, the new Iraqi security forces, including the army, are composed of militia elements that "retain their original loyalties or affiliations," as the Pentagon acknowledged last July in a sentence buried in a generally upbeat report to Congress on "measuring stability and security in Iraq." Such units, if made combat-ready, "might very well turn these very arms against each other," notes Pavel Baev, who is a senior analyst for the Center for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. So, what does history teach about how civil wars end? Baev's answer is not especially hopeful. "A military victory on one side," he replied.

What Is Civil War?
If men and women are all, in the end, brothers and sisters, it might be argued that all wars are civil wars -- except for any future ones that might be fought against extraterrestrials. And some historians define civil war in very broad terms. The British historian Paul Johnson labels the First World War a civil war between combatants who shared, if not a common country, largely a common (in that case, Western) culture. He has a point -- certainly the First World War had more of a civil-war aspect than, say, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, in which two starkly different societies quarreled over imperial stakes.

But the habit of scholars is to divide the universe between wars fought between states and wars fought within states. Left out of this equation altogether is genocide -- because it is presumed to be one-sided -- and "unorganized" violence, like rioting. Marquee interstate conflicts, such as World War II, tend to captivate us. But as the Stanford experts Fearon and Laitin demonstrate in "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," a paper published in the February 2003 American Political Science Review, civil wars are more numerous and tend to last longer. And over the past 50 years, civil wars have collectively killed a much greater number of people.

Between 1945 and 1999, analysts showed, about 3.3 million battle deaths occurred in 25 interstate wars, whose median duration was about three months. Over this same timeframe, about 16.2 million people in 73 states died in 127 civil wars, whose median duration was about six years. The roll call includes the familiar -- Afghanistan, Somalia, the Balkans, and Lebanon -- as well as other highly lethal wars that for one reason or another received scant media attention. In that second category are a spate of conflicts in obscure places like the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Georgia.

Civil war these days tends to be thought of as a mostly non-Western, developing-world event. But while Africa, the Middle East, and the impoverished regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus have been prone to civil wars in recent decades, the sweep of history reveals no such cultural predisposition. Civil wars -- such as the 17th-century English civil war, which inspired Thomas Hobbes to write Leviathan -- were once prevalent in Europe and arguably, as in the British Isles, helped to cement the power of pro-parliament forces and end rule by monarchy.

America's Founders certainly did not view civil wars as foreign to Western culture. Nor did they see democracy as a barrier to civil war. "Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious," Alexander Hamilton observed in No. 6 of The Federalist Papers, which (along with his companion essays in Nos. 7, 8, and 9) broadly argued that civil war was virtually inevitable among the weak states of the new America unless the states sought union in a robust constitutional compact.

It is a commonplace that civil wars result from irreconcilable differences of the ethnic, religious, or tribal sort. But the assessment by Fearon and Laitin does not support this view. They point out that many states are culturally diverse but do not fall prey to civil war. The causes of civil war, in their analysis, reside in politically weak and corrupt central governments, which tend to breed societal rifts. In this model, it is a failed or failing state that is highly vulnerable to civil war. And it is only when armed conflict looms that diverse communities -- whether Sarajevo in the late 1980s or Baghdad in 2003 -- start to break down along lines of religion or ethnicity.

"All states are like rocks, with fissures in those rocks," says Mark Stoyle, a historian at the University of Southampton in England, who is the author of the recently published Soldiers & Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War. "If the state is hit by a hammer blow, it will break along certain lines." That is what happened in 17th-century Britain under the disputed reign of King Charles I, Stoyle observed, and in his view, what is happening now in Iraq.

The Iraqi Civil War, 2004-?
Of course, not all civil wars are alike, and Americans might be forgiven, based on their knowledge of the U.S. Civil War, for not seeing anything quite like a civil war taking place in Iraq. "The [U.S.] Civil War was fought mainly as a conventional war between two well-organized states and their well-organized armies," historian James McPherson of Princeton noted in an e-mail. "I think it would be barking up the wrong tree to draw parallels or similarities between Iraq and the American Civil War."

But against the backdrop of history, it is the U.S. Civil War, not the one now taking place in Iraq, that stands out as anomalous. Civil wars typically lack a Fort Sumter moment -- it is usually hard to identify a precise beginning. Characteristics of the civil war in Iraq -- the prevalence of militia bands, the "ethnic cleansing" under way in various communities, the suspected existence of government-connected death and torture squads -- bear likenesses to civil wars fought in places such as Lebanon in the 1970s; Guatemala in the 1980s; and Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia in the 1990s. "What we have in Iraq is an unconventional civil war," says Juan Cole, a Middle East history professor at the University of Michigan and keeper of a well-read blog on events in Iraq. Cole added that present-day Iraq reminds him of Lebanon in the late 1970s, when that country's civil war was conducted largely by neighborhood-based militias.

It is not possible, at this early and indeterminate stage, to offer a seamless chronicle of the civil war that Iraq is experiencing. But a rough narrative, taking note of the milestones and the dynamic that are propelling the civil war, can be assembled. It is a story not so much of a country's liberation, but of its fragmentation.

The "hammer blow," to use the historian Stoyle's term, was the U.S.-led attack on Iraq in March 2003, which shattered Saddam's regime, drove him from power and put the United States in charge as the provisional authority. Washington did not intend to create the conditions for civil war -- the White House seemed to believe that it could decapitate the regime by removing Saddam and still preserve order. But that was not to be. The decapitation created a power vacuum, which began filling up with a complex brew of resentments and ambitions.

An obvious target of resentment, particularly for Iraqi Sunni Arabs used to running things in the country, were the U.S. soldiers. But American troops soon came under attack from not only determined Sunni partisans, but also Shiite Arab militants such as the recruits from the slums of Baghdad who pledged allegiance to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Indeed, the Iraqi conflict at first looked like a classic anti-imperial or anti-occupier insurgency, with the U.S. in the same role that the British had played in Iraq decades earlier and the French had in Algeria. Something like an Arab nationalist revolt, fanned by the flames of anti-American media coverage in the Arab world, seemed to be under way.

But by the end of 2003, close observers of Iraq were seeing in the conflict a localized, sectarian element that was separate and apart from Arab or Iraqi nationalist stirrings against the United States as occupier. For three decades, W. Patrick Lang has been an Arab specialist in the U.S. government, in positions including intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first professor of Arabic language at West Point. Now a consultant in the private sector, Lang has visited Iraq some 20 times over the years. Less than a year after the U.S. invasion, "it became clear," Lang said in a recent interview, that a civil-war-like conflict was under way. (Stanford political scientist Laitin says he would backdate the onset of civil war, more formally, to the point of legal transition from foreign occupation to self-rule: the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004.)

At the root of the civil war, Lang says, are Sunni Arabs contesting for control of an Iraq in which Shiite Arabs feel newly empowered. Like Bosnia under the Austro-Hapsburg Empire, Lang says, pre-invasion Baathist Iraq was a kind of "ecumenical melting pot." And even though Sunnis were largely in control, secular Shiites occupied important posts in institutions like the police force, the civil service, the universities, and the army. It was "a pressure-cooker approach to forming national identity," Lang says, and "we interrupted this process of amalgamation.... By taking the lid off this pressure cooker, we have allowed these various elements to resolve themselves into their basic form." Some 20 cities and towns around Baghdad, once mixed, are segregating along Shiite and Sunni lines, according to a recent New York Times count.

As the journalist Anthony Shadid illustrates in Night Draws Near, his nuanced account of post-invasion Iraq, it is not only Iraq's Shiite community that has recovered a kind of missionary religious identity since Saddam's fall. In the "vacuum" that resulted "when nearly every institution that had ruled the country for a generation was overthrown," Shadid writes in his book, "religious influences that had been sweeping the Arab world for decades but had lain underground in Iraq emerged into the open and began to fill the void" among young men in Sunni towns like Khaldiya. It was not the desire to return Saddam to power or avenge his fall, Shadid says, that was motivating a new cadre of Sunni fighters. It was the "strains of political Islam."

Also into the void in Iraq came Sunni Arab fighters from neighboring countries such as Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. There was a sectarian cast to their struggle as well. After all, the rising terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordan-born militant Sunni Islamist who has links to Al Qaeda, had explicitly authorized the killing of Iraqi Shiites under the banner of holy war. He has taken credit for the murder of a senior aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, and formed a special unit, the Omar Corps, aimed at eradicating the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-trained armed branch of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite community's top political party. Thus, the ancient schism between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam has been revived -- a rift that dates back to the decades after the Prophet Mohammed died in 632.

And beyond the newly contested matters of political power and religious authority is the question of wealth, represented by Iraq's enormous reserves of oil. The oil prize can be a potent stimulus of civil war. It was an important ingredient in the Angolan civil war, which began in 1974 after the end of Portuguese colonial rule and ran on for 27 years, killing some 500,000 people. In the Arab world, the Sunnis, representing both the political and the financial establishment, are used to controlling the oil. In Iraq, Saddam's fall immediately threatened that control, with both the Shiite Arab communities in the south and the non-Arab Kurdish community in the north seeing oil resources as key to their political and economic resurgence.

"From the point of view of the Sunni Arab hinterland," extending from Iraq to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, "a result of the American war in Iraq was a gigantic theft of a core Sunni territory," says Ian S. Lustick, a Middle East specialist who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania. And this "theft," Lustick says, is the primary motivator for Sunnis to take part in civil war. Much as Paul Johnson saw World War I as a civil war within European culture, analysts such as Lustick see Iraq as the focal point of a larger civil war within Arab and Islamic culture.

The Veiled Shiite Response
Iraq's Shiites, especially those of a religious bent, were the perennial losers in the prewar society ruled principally by secular Sunni Arabs. In Iraq under Saddam, Shiites who did not accept his dictatorship were routinely tortured and killed, and their political parties were gutted. In post-Saddam Iraq, the Shiites look like winners, since they make up about 60 percent of the population and are thus favored by virtually any kind of democratic formula.

But democracy is not, in itself, might. Determined to protect a much-enhanced status that was essentially gifted to them by the U.S.-led invasion, the Shiites are mobilizing to fight the Sunni Arabs if need be. And at least some Shiites are already engaged in violence, including reprisals against the Sunni Arab population.

But while the self-promoted exploits of the Sunni Arab fighters garner regular headlines, the violent measures of Shiite warriors are difficult to discern. This is not a surprise: Having gone heavily to the polls and invested in the rhetoric and procedures of democracy, the Shiite community has every reason to hide any sectarian attacks that its side commits.

Nevertheless, a pattern of such attacks is apparent, going back at least two years. On December 9 of 2003, an explosion at a Sunni mosque in the Hurriyya district of western Baghdad, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood, killed three Sunnis. The imam said that rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the mosque. On December 24, in a predominantly Shiite part of Baghdad, four Sunnis leaving a mosque were killed in a drive-by shooting. Such incidents led Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based journalist touring Iraq at that time, to write about the country's "shattered communal peace."

Arab media sympathetic to Iraq's Sunnis have portrayed violence directed against them as organized by Shiite "puppet" police and national guard forces. These media focus on the Badr Brigade as the main culprit; one such anti-Shiite source, in a typical allegation, said that Badr Brigade infiltrators of the police and guard "have set up death squads to target Sunni activists."

A very well-respected source, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, asserted in a report on Iraq in October: "The last six months have also seen an upsurge in murders being carried out with a distinctly sectarian motive. Although radical Sunni jihadists originally drove these trends, militias and death squads on both sides of the sectarian divide -- those aligned with the insurgency and [with] the government -- now carry them out."

Death squads aligned with the government? That phrase draws a knowing nod from any historian of modern civil war. In Iraq, the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry steadfastly denies existence of any such squads. But the ministry, which is headed by Bayan Jabr, an ex-leader of the Badr Brigade, was recently embarrassed by American troops' accidental discovery of an apparent secret torture chamber in the basement of a ministry building in Baghdad.

Most of the 170 or so detainees were reportedly Sunni Arabs. The supervisors were said to be Interior police with ties to the Badr outfit, and evidence of torture included malnourished captives and skinned corpses. An Iraqi student told Reuters that he "was hung blindfolded in excruciating positions and called 'a Sunni dog' by ... Shiite interrogators."

The Iraqi Army
The makeup and base loyalty of the new Iraqi army is an even more fundamental matter. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," Bush says with respect to U.S. troops. OK, but which Iraqis will be standing up? Despite American efforts to recruit Sunnis, the Iraqi army is at present a divided organization of Shiite-dominated units, including some tied to the Badr Brigade and Kurdish regiments connected to the Peshmergas of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Back in September, a Los Angeles Times reporter found Iraqi soldiers chanting, "Long live [Shiite Ayatollah] Sistani!" after they were given control of the Shiite shrine city of Najaf. In mid-October, Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter offered an account of a week spent with the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division. "The soldiers are overwhelmingly Shiite," Lasseter wrote, and "they're seeking revenge against the Sunnis who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein's rule." He noted that the brigade's top officer routinely reviewed major decisions with a local Shiite cleric aligned with Sistani.

Lasseter concluded his piece with this observation from a sergeant major with the brigade: "Your country had to have a civil war," the Iraqi soldier told the American journalist. "It will be the same here. Everything in this world has its price. In Iraq, the price for peace will be blood."

In a follow-up piece a week later, Lasseter quoted a "senior U.S. military official in Baghdad": "Maybe they just need to have their civil war. ... In this part of the world, it's almost a way of life."

Brendan O'Leary, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who is a constitutional adviser to the Kurdish government, lived in Iraq for the first six months of 2004 and revisited this year. "There is a civil war among Arabs in Iraq, in my view," he said in a recent interview, and "the real problem is this: There is no Iraqi army."

Although the Iraqi civil war is principally an affair between Arabs, there is a Kurdish dimension as well. The Kurds, who are predominantly Sunni but ethnically separate from Arabs, have historically lacked their own sovereign state and are resolved to include in their Iraqi sphere of control the oil-rich area in and around the northern city of Kirkuk. In a Balkans-style tableau, the Kurds, who themselves were once the victims of a vicious ethnic-cleansing campaign at the hands of Saddam, have mounted their own initiative to reassert a dominance by numbers over the local Arab and Turkomen communities.

After Saddam's capture, violence there has been persistent, including murders of local Kurdish officials, but also killings of Sunni Arabs in clashes with Kurdish militias. Sunni Arabs tend to view U.S. troop operations in this area in conjunction with Kurdish units as part of the Kurdish drive for control. In The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, the journalist George Packer identifies volatile Kirkuk as the likeliest spot for the breakout of large-scale civil-war combat. "The obsession with ethnic identity had become the ultimate legacy of Saddam's rule, his diabolical revenge on his countrymen," Packer writes in his recently published book.

A Widening of the Civil War?
At this juncture, the war dead from the Iraqi conflict, now 32 months long, include more than 2,100 U.S. soldiers, according to the Pentagon, and at least 27,000 Iraqi civilians, according to a tabulation, based on media sources, by the Iraq Body Count project, a U.K.-based group.

There is no way to say, even roughly, what share of these deaths can be attributed to civil warfare, as distinct from other types of violence. What can be said is that by historical standards, the Iraqi civil war, whether dated from Saddam's capture in December 2003 or from the post-occupation shift to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004, is in a relatively early stage. Fragile governments like the new Iraqi one frequently struggle long and hard to defeat determined resisters. A possible reference point, for example, is the civil war that broke out in 1992 between the repressive, post-colonial government of Algeria and Islamic radical guerrillas. Violence, including wholesale massacres of villages, flourished despite elections in which the government won a large popular majority; in 2000, many armed insurgent groups disbanded as part of a national reconciliation, but even afterward, some confrontations with government units continued.

It is painfully evident that U.S. forces, as powerful as they are, cannot stop the civil war. Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania compares the U.S. role, in this sense, to the Israeli occupiers of 1980s Lebanon, who achieved their objective of destroying the base of the Palestine Liberation Organization but who were then powerless to stop ensuing fighting between Shiite, Druze, and Christian bands.

What if the U.S. withdraws its forces? One possibility is that Iraqi Shiites, marshaling the security forces of the government, would in fact be able to crush the Iraqi Sunni rejectionists or at least stop the rejectionists' vicious campaign of urban terrorism. But the price could well be the end of any hope for a genuine Iraqi democracy. At a recent seminar on "new perspectives on insurgency," sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, Kalev Sepp, a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer and a counterinsurgency expert who has been an adviser in Iraq, offered an analogy drawn from Uruguay in the 1960s and early 1970s.

At that time, Sepp noted, the government was battling the Tupamaros, a leftist guerrilla organization specializing in Iraq-style bombings, kidnappings (including of prominent foreigners), and assassinations. The government declared a state of "internal war" and decreed that the presence of more than one guest at a dinner party could be considered an illegal political gathering; the regime, which was controlled by the military, also used mass arrests and torture to defeat the Tupamaros."It's not that difficult" to defeat urban-terrorism movements, Sepp said, but "urban terrorists do often achieve their goal of making their targets abandon democracy." This pattern could indeed repeat in Iraq: Some Iraqi Shiite leaders are already begging Washington to permit them to take off the gloves in dealing with Sunni guerrillas.

Another scenario that could play out after withdrawal of U.S. forces is even darker. Analysts such as Cole believe that the wider Arab Sunni world would not stand idly by while Iraqi Shiites thrashed outnumbered Iraqi Sunni fighters. He predicts that, with the U.S. out, Sunni fighters from Saudi Arabia and Jordan would likely pour into Iraq to support their brethren. Their intervention could, in turn, spur an armed intervention from Iran, a Shiite-dominated country of non-Arab Persians, in support of Iraqi Shiites. (The British government believes that sympathetic Iranians are already offering unofficial military assistance to Iraqi Shiites.) The result would be a kind of Middle East version of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, sucking in foreign powers from all sides.

Yet another wild card in this post-U.S. pullout scenario is the possible intervention of Turkish troops to deter any thoughts that Kurdish leaders in Iraq might have about including ethnically Kurdish sections of Turkey in a newly independent "Kurdistan." Such an aggressive action seems unlikely, given Turkey's political priority to join the European Union and not antagonize Western leaders, but it cannot be ruled out.

Mesopotamia's Choice
Perhaps the best judges of what might happen should the United States abruptly depart are the Iraqi people themselves. And on this score, their assessment is frightening. "I think you would get overwhelming assent from Iraqis that should American troops be precipitously withdrawn from the war, civil war and escalation of the sectarian conflict already under way would become virtually inevitable," John Burns, the Baghdad-based war correspondent for The New York Times, told PBS's Charlie Rose in a November 28 interview. An intermediate possibility is that U.S. ground troops leave Iraq but the Pentagon maintains air power to back up Iraqi government ground forces. But this is tricky: With Iraqis on the ground presumably calling in targets, the U.S. would be, in effect, hostage to their recommendations of places to hit and would still likely be seen, as it is today, as an abettor of one side in a sectarian conflict.

Is there really nothing, on the political-diplomatic front, that Washington and the international community can do to stop the logic of civil war in Iraq? Looking past the December 15 elections, some optimists are focusing on the possibility of turning Iraq's makeshift constitution, which remains a work in progress, into a guardian of a new political, economic, and social order.

One step, which might be called the "breakup" option, is promoted by such experts as Peter W. Galbraith, who as ambassador to Croatia in the mid-1990s helped to end the war between Croatia and Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia by reintegrating a piece of Serb-held territory into Croatia. "As Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, the first Bush administration put all its diplomatic muscle into a doomed effort to hold the country together, and it did nothing to stop the coming war," Galbraith recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

His recommended solution, given his view that "George W. Bush broke up Iraq when he ordered the invasion in 2003," is a radically decentralized Iraq that would accommodate a secular Kurdistan in the north, a Shiite Islamic state in the south, and a Sunni area in the middle, each having its own military. The military aspect of this proposal is crucial: The current situation, in which the Sunni-Arab-dominated chunk of Iraq is patrolled by a hated, Shiite-dominated army, strikes many analysts as an obvious formula for increased violence. Not all of Iraq's Sunni Arab fighters are hard-line rejectionists; some might lay down their arms in return for regional autonomy.

Galbraith's proposal is a post-Tito-Balkans-style prescription for stability. It is a seductive idea; but unlike the former Yugoslavia, post-Saddam Iraq is in a way cursed by its oil prize, a lure for all the major factions. A "Sunni-stan" wedged in between a northern Kurdistan and a southern "Shiite-stan" might be cut off from the oil fields -- which could add yet another motivation for aggrieved Sunnis to take up the gun.

Both the New York Times editorial page and the Bush White House -- not usually in agreement -- envision a broken-up Iraq as a nightmare. Alexander Hamilton probably would agree. Drawing on the political philosophy of Montesquieu and the fractious history of Greek and Italian mini-states, Hamilton writes in Federalist 9 that the alternative to a strong union is "an infinity of little, jealous, clashing, tumultuous commonwealths, the wretched nurseries of unceasing discord and the miserable objects of universal pity or contempt." Is it so much a leap across time and culture to imagine a dismembered Iraq as just such a place?

Although analogies to the Iraq civil war can illuminate, they have their limits. Nobody can "solve" the war, including Washington, without first understanding its unique dynamic. But that particular dynamic has so far proved elusive. The resort to metaphor, however useful, is also an indicator of how tough the Iraqi conflict is to grasp on its own terms.

As for the more general idea that civil wars are, in essence, about vengeance, as the historian Arno Mayer suggested, that insight does seem to apply to today's Iraq. This is a grim, but not hopeless, notion. After all, the human desire for score-settling is powerful but not inexhaustible. It will be up to the Iraqis to decide when to stop the torturing and killing -- up to them, and to their neighbors in the region, to choose something other than civil warfare.

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