All Intensive Purposes

Michael O'Hanlon worries that U.S. forces in Iraq may be taking the wrong approach to the incipient civil war:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that U.S. forces would not become heavily involved in any civil strife, leaving it instead to Iraqis to sort out the problem. This approach, which mirrors the relatively passive approach U.S. troops took to the reprisal violence after the Feb. 22 bombing, has an understandable appeal. But it is akin to our decision to stand aside and allow wanton looting after Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003, and it could have comparably disastrous consequences.

If civil war begins in Iraq, it will probably consist of increasingly active vigilante justice -- as well as random, pointless acts of violent rage -- by Iraq's powerful militias. They will attack defenseless mosques, homes of important figures from other ethnic and religious groups, and defenseless citizens. They will begin to perpetrate ethnic cleansing with cold, premeditated purpose. As time goes on, hearing about similar behavior by other militias from other sectarian groups, they will also be motivated by a desire for vengeance -- not just for Hussein's atrocities of yesteryear but for what happened last week and last night. And they will seek to protect their own unarmed families and friends by stepping up ethnic cleansing in neighborhoods where they live, to preclude the possibility of further attacks against their own kin.

These are the typical dynamics of civil conflicts, as analyzed by scholars such as John Mueller, Barry Posen, Steve Stedman and Chaim Kaufmann. Civil wars with a heavy ethnic dimension do not typically begin as full-blown conflicts but rather develop an internal dynamic in which hate, rage and fear increasingly influence the actions of a growing number of people.

You could add Chris Hedges' War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning to that list.