Many people have drawn historical parallels between Iraq and other conflicts, usually for a partisan purpose. At United Press International, security experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt offer a new one:

The conflict raging in Iraq has been compared to many earlier wars, but the best historical comparison has been largely overlooked. ***

The civil war that is the most fitting historical reference point to Iraq today is the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). That war revolved around two main sides: one pro-democracy, the other pro-fascist. Neither side was particularly cohesive or well-organized. Both consisted of fractious coalitions of diverse organizations and agendas, many based on personality. It often looked more like a war of fragmented tribes and clans than modern organizations.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt offer several more parallels between the two conflicts, including the importance of foreign fighters and the primacy of propaganda. They acknowledge that the analogy is "imprecise," but overlook several blindingly obvious differences between the two conflicts. More about that later.

Like most who draw historical parallels, Arquilla and Ronfeldt are quick to jump to policy implications:

The Spanish model serves to confirm that Iraq is indeed undergoing a civil war. It speaks to man’s continuing capacity for reverting to a savage tribalism while taking God’s name in vain. It shows how the ensuing destruction can lead people to prefer order over liberty. It augurs ill for a flowering of democracy in Iraq. It compounds doubts that much if any good at all can or will come of this conflict.

But wait! How, exactly, does the "Spanish model...confirm that Iraq is indeed undergoing a civil war?" While I agree that there are some likenesses between Spain and Iraq, one can argue much more persuasively that the patent differences between the two conflicts confirm that Iraq is not undergoing a civil war.

In Spain, rival armies took the field and fought battles. To be sure, atrocities were also committed and many civilians were murdered. But the Spanish Civil War was unmistakably a war, in which armies clashed and many soldiers died. This is not the case in Iraq, where there is a high level of violence, mostly terrorist in nature, and where militias sometimes resemble (small) armies, but where nothing resembling a major battle has been fought since 2003.

This basic fact is reflected in the relatively low level of violence in Iraq, compared to Spain during its civil war. Arquilla and Ronfeldt say that a million people died in the Spanish Civil War. That number is an outlier, but estimates of casualties are all over the map, so let's assume that Wikipedia's statement that the consensus is around 500,000 deaths, military and civilian, is close. Spain in the 1930s had a population similar to today's Iraq, and its civil war lasted for 33 months. Do the math: using the 500,000 estimate, around 15,000 people a month were killed. Now, compare that to Iraq. According to the Associated Press's most recent numbers, 1,850 people a month have died from war-related violence in Iraq during 2007--up, the AP says, from 2006. That's one-eighth the level of the Spanish Civil War (one-sixteenth, if the authors' estimate of a million deaths is accurate). Imagine--if you can--an Iraq with eight times, or sixteen times, its current level of violence. That's the Spanish Civil War.

So, how exactly does the Spanish conflict teach us that little if any "good at all can or will come of this conflict?" Why shouldn't we infer that the far lower level of violence in Iraq augurs an even better outcome than we have seen in Spain?

Arquilla and Ronfeldt draw a further policy lesson from the Spanish experience:

[I]t may be advisable to pull back from pressing for an American-style democracy in Iraq. Ending the Spanish Civil War resulted in the installation of a dictatorship for 40 years before Spain eventually transitioned into a liberal democracy.

This is an odd way to describe what happened in Spain. That country's civil war wasn't "ended" by some outside agency, resulting in the "installation" of a dictatorship. The Nationalists won the war, and Franco assumed dictatorial powers, as he had always intended. The truth is that democracy was probably not an alternative for Spain in the 1930s. The Republicans were led largely by Soviet agents and other radicals, and would no more have instituted a democracy, had they won, than Franco.

But why does that Spanish reality of the 1930s tell us what will happen in Iraq? In Iraq, there is a genuine democratic alternative; in fact, however one may evaluate its government, Iraq is already a functioning democracy. Iraq's experiment in self-government may very well fail, but the Spanish experience tells us nothing about that, one way or another.

The study of history is endlessly fascinating in its own right, and one can sometimes draw valuable lessons from historical analogies. But this requires an objectivity and fair-mindedness that are in short supply when it comes to Iraq.

Via Power Line News.

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Posted by John at 6:05 PM  |    |