From The Guardian UK
By Brian Whitaker

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, has become the latest public figure to warn that Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war: “In fact,” he said, “we are almost there.” Less than 24 hours earlier, the king of Jordan said in a TV interview: “We could possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands,” the three being Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

There is an understandable reluctance on the part of politicians and large sections of the media to admit that civil war has broken out in Iraq. Instead they continue talking about “fears” of civil war and how it might be averted, but as far as most political scientists are concerned it’s a civil war already.

Take this more-or-less standard definition from Wikipedia:

A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight for political power or control of an area. Political scientists use two criteria: the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political centre, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second criteria is that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.

By that measure, Iraq is not only in the throes of any civil war but one of the bloodiest in recent history. “It’s stunning; it should have been called a civil war a long time ago, but now I don’t see how people can avoid calling it a civil war,” Nicholas Sambanis, a political scientist at Yale university told the New York Times the other day. “The level of violence is so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since 1945.”