Until Iraq, I really thought I understood what a “civil war” was. Or, more accurately, I understood that a great variety of intrastate conflagrations could be rightfully termed “civil war”. The American Civil War was a civil war. In a different sense, Bosnia and Rwanda were civil wars marked by hideous power imbalances. ~Brian Beutler

Part of the confusion about whether we should call the Iraqi civil war a civil war or not (I think we should, since at bottom that’s what it is) stems from just this sort of broad, lazy definition of civil war.  This isn’t really Mr. Beutler’s fault–a lot of people don’t define it properly, and almost everyone thinks that our “Civil War” was a civil war.  After all, that’s what they were taught in school, and that’s what most scholars call it.  Iraq war supporters have taken advantage of this confusion and used it to argue, more  or less, that the lack of an organised Army of Northern Anbar marching in columns with drummer boys and flags proves that Iraq is not in the grips of civil war, as if Iraqi Sunni insurgents were interested in anything other than retaking power in Baghdad.  It is the foreigners (and some of the Kurds) who want to split up Iraq–most of the Iraqis may not “think” of themselves principally as Iraqis, as Lugar said, but that does not mean that they do not want their own group to control all of Iraq, or as much of it as they can manage.  A lack of shared identity or a lack of a shared interpretation of national identity is usually a prerequisite to civil war; it does not necessarily entail partition or separation. 

Sometimes, for the sake of brevity and communication, I still use the phrase Civil War to refer to the War of Secession, but this is not an accurate name.  I use the translation of the French name (guerre de la Secession) because the French, God bless them, do not have the hang-ups of Unionist historiography compelling them to use language that legitimises the mythical of the eternal Union.  The only way that a war between states that had left the Union and those that remained in the United States could be classified as a civil war is if the seceding states sought to conquer and subjugate the other states (which would make secession seem a strange move) or if “the Union” was not actually a union but a consolidated state inside of which a war was raging between citizens of that same state.  Neither of these was the case, so I submit that “the Civil War” was not any such thing.  It was a war of secession in which the anti-secessionist forces won.  A similar point might be made about the wars in what was Yugoslavia: they were wars of secession from different polities.  Strangely enough, we do not call colonial wars for independence “civil wars”–our War for Independence is not called “the British civil war” on either side of the Atlantic, and the Dutch rebellion against Spain is not called the “Habsburg civil war” (and it would be ridiculous if it were).  From a certain French perspective, the war in Algeria was a kind of French civil war, inasmuch as the French regarded Algeria as an integral part of France by that time, but it wasn’t really a civil war, either.  Many people in the press referred to the North Yemeni invasion of the newly-constituted Democratic Republic of Yemen (a successor to the Marxist South Yemen) as civil war, but it was the suppression of separatism pure and simple.

As I have said before, and as I will probably say again before it’s all over, a civil war is, as the name implied, a war fought between citizens of the same polity.  The Roman civil wars are a good standard to which can compare other wars to test whether they are being fought between fellow citizens or not; the English, Spanish and Russian civil wars were likewise genuine civil wars.  Citizens of seceding states who want to create a new confederation of states might reasonably be defined, from the perspective of the union from which they seceded, as rebels of a sort, but they are not  fellow citizens with the people they are fighting.  Also, they are not interested in seizing control of the government of the union from which they have separated.  Both of those conditions would probably be necessary for such a war to be correctly labeled a civil war.