With debate sweeping national airwaves this week about whether the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq has reached the point of "civil war," several Penn State professors said the country has been engaged in civil war for some time.
"I would say it is," said Navin Bapat, assistant professor of international politics, "because most political science definitions of civil war that I know of require 1,000 fatalities as a result of two warring factions fighting over a change in policy and control of the center."
Debate concerning the term used to classify the Iraq conflict peaked after TV network NBC announced Monday that it would begin using the term in its reporting on the situation. Networks ABC and CBS have so far refrained from using the term.
President George Bush avoided using the term civil war when asked about the conflict Tuesday.
Bapat and others agreed that the situation is a civil war and that its status as such is not a recent revelation.
Last month, Richard Aquila, professor of history and director of humanities and social sciences at Penn State Erie, organized a five-member panel discussion titled "Iraq: Where do we go from here?"
"The reason why the Bush administration refuses to call it a civil war is because they claim there is no political agenda on either side. Personally, I don't buy that," Aquila said.
Aquila said that, in effect, both religious factions want to be the "last man standing" when the United States finally withdraws, and the faction that is the dominant force at that time will be able to gain political power.
While Bush has denied any similarities between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, Aquila said he sees a parallel between the two wars when considering the U.S. government's hesitancy to use the term "civil war" to describe the ongoing violence.
In the 1960s, Aquila said, peace advocates against the Vietnam War made the argument that what was going on in South Vietnam was a civil war, and for that reason argued that the United States should not be involved.
He said the Bush administration does not want to label the sectarian violence a civil war because, using Vietnam's precedent, it would mean they should get out of Iraq.
Scott Bennett, international politics professor, was cautious in terming the violence a civil war because of the intertwining of political and religious motives, but said technical definitions were missing the point. "The term civil war or whether you call it something else -- it's not stable democracy," he said. "The reason they don't want to [call it a civil war] is that it makes it sound really disastrous to the American public."
As the occupying military in Iraq, the United States had not learned from similar situations in the past and the sectarian violence could be attributed to the United States "not necessarily as things we did, but things we didn't react to quickly enough," Bennett said.
Arthur Goldschmidt, professor emeritus of Middle East history, pointed to 2003 -- after the United State's toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime as the turning point in the rise in sectarian violence constituting a civil war.
By dissolving the Iraqi army and police forces under Hussein, Goldschmidt said the United States erred by cutting loose a large number of men who were no longer paid but still had weapons. "We created a huge body of angry, heavily armed Sunni Iraqis," he said.
Goldschmidt, who has written a number of books on Middle East history and culture, said a lack of understanding of the differences in Sunni and Shiite culture also impeded the United State's ability to quell the violence.
"We clearly didn't understand the importance of family ties, sectarian loyalties and economic interests of the various ethnic and religious groups in Iraq," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
