Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam

Abstract

The conflict in Iraq has been portrayed as “ethnic” civil war, a radically different conflict from “ideological” wars such as Vietnam. We argue that such an assessment is misleading, as is its theoretical foundation, which we call the “ethnic war model.” Neither Iraq nor Vietnam conforms to the ethnic war model's predictions. The sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni militias is not simply the outcome of sectarian cleavages in Iraqi society, but to an important extent, a legacy of U.S. occupation. On the other hand, although Vietnam was a society riven by ethnic cleavages, the Vietnam War also fails to conform to the ethnic war model. We show that there is no necessary overlap between ethnic conflict and ethnic war. Some ethnic conflicts evolve into ethnic wars, and others develop dynamics virtually indistinguishable from those of ideological civil wars. We suggest that the state's role is essential in transforming conflicts into either ethnic or irregular wars. We conclude with an analysis of the current situation and future prospects in Iraq.

Keywords

civil wars ethnic conflict political violence Iraq War Vietnam War

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Throughout this article, we follow the current political science convention that extends to the term ethnic the meaning of ascriptive—hence, covering cleavages associated to religion, sect, or cast. See Donald Horowitz , Ethnic Groups in Conflict ( Berkeley: University of California Press , 1985), 17-18.

Stephen Biddle , “ Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon ,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 2 (2006): 2-14 .

Leslie Gelb , “ Last Train from Baghdad ,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (2006): 160-65 .

Peter Galbraith , The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End ( New York: Simon & Schuster , 2006); Chaim Kaufmann , “ Separating Iraqis, Saving Iraq ,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (2006): 156-60 .

Kaufmann, “Separating Iraqis, Saving Iraq.”

Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon.”

A few civil wars are fought conventionally; the great majority, however, are irregular ones. See Stathis N. Kalyvas , “Warfare in Civil Wars,” in Rethinking the Nature of War, ed. Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom ( Abingdon: Frank Cass , 2005), 88-108.

Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” 5.

Chaim Kaufmann , “ Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars ,” International Security 20, no. 4 (1996): 136-75 ; Chaim Kaufmann , “ Intervention in Ethnic and Ideological Civil Wars: Why One Can Be Done and the Other Can't ,” Security Studies 6, no. 1 (1996): 62-100 .

10.

By cleavage, we mean the salient system of group classification in a society and its conflicts. Civil wars motivated by religion are “ethnic” only when they implicate ethnic religious “groups,” as opposed to being deployed around the religious—secular divide (as in the Spanish or Algerian civil wars). Ethnic civil wars are often referred to as “identity” civil wars, as if nonethnic civil wars did not involve identities. Likewise, the use of the terms ideological and revolutionary for nonethnic civil wars is problematic: ethnic concerns are primarily ideological and potentially revolutionary.

11.

Kaufmann, “Intervention in Ethnic and Ideological Civil Wars.”

12.

Stathis N. Kalyvas , The Logic of Violence in Civil War ( New York: Cambridge University Press , 2006).

13.

Solomon Moore and Louise Roug , “ Deaths across Iraq Show It Is a Nation of Many Wars, with U.S. in the Middle ,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2006, sec. A, p. 1 .

14.

For an extensive discussion of definitions and violence thresholds, see Nicholas Sambanis , “ What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition ,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48, no. 6 (2004): 814-58 .

15.

See for example, Ellen Knickmeyer and Muhanned Saif Aldin , “ Families Flee Iraqi River Towns on 4th Day of Sectarian Warfare ,” Washington Post, October 17, 2006, sec. A, p. 1 .

16.

Michael Gordon , Mark Mazzetti , and Thom Shanker , “ Bombs Aimed at G.I.'s in Iraq Are Increasing ,” New York Times, August 17, 2006, sec. A, p. 1 .

17.

Sudarsan Raghavan , “ Distrust Breaks the Bonds of a Baghdad Neighborhood ,” in “ Mixed Area, Violence Defies Peace Efforts ,” New York Times, September 27, 2006, sec. A, p. 1 ; Sabrina Tavernise , “ Many Iraqis Look to Gunmen as Protectors ,” New York Times, October 21, 2006, sec. A, p. 1 ; Ellen Knickmeyer , “ In Balad, Age-old Ties Were `Destroyed in a Second,' Sectarian Battles Drive Out Sunnis, Create State of Siege ,” Washington Post, October 23, 2006, sec. A, p. 12 .

18.

Phebe Marr , The Modern History of Iraq ( Boulder, CO: Westview , 2003); Charles Tripp , A History of Iraq ( Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press , 2002); Hana Batatu , The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baathists, and Free Officers ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1978).

19.

Scott Straus , The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press , 2006); Tone Bringa , Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1995).

20.

Georgi Derluguian , Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 2005); V.P. Gagnon , The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s ( Ithaca, NY , and London: Cornell University Press , 2004); David Laitin , “ Secessionist Rebellion in the Former Soviet Union ,” Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 8 (2001): 839-61 .

21.

Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor , Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq ( New York: Pantheon , 2006); Thomas Ricks , Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq ( New York: Penguin , 2006).

22.

Helene Cooper , “ Rice, on Her Way to Vietnam, Sees No Parallels between That War and Iraq ,” International Herald Tribune, November 16, 2006, p. 1 .

23.

David E. Sanger , “ On to Vietnam, Bush Hears Echoes of 1968 in Iraq 2006 ,” New York Times, November 17, 2006, p. A12 .

24.

Ricks, Fiasco, 187-88.

25.

For example, Christopher Hitchens , “Beating a Dead Parrot: Why Iraq and Vietnam Have Nothing Whatsoever in Common ,” Slate , January 31, 2005, http://www.slate.com/id/2112895/.

26.

Robert K. Brigham , Is Iraq Another Vietnam? ( New York: PublicAffairs , 2006).

27.

Samuel Huntington , Political Order in Changing Societies ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press , 1968), 646.

28.

Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies; Douglas Pike , Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press , 1966); Walker Connor , “ Ethnology and the Peace of South Asia ,” World Politics 22, no. 1 (1969): 51-86 .

29.

Connor, “Ethnology and the Peace of South Asia,” 57-58.

30.

Ibid., 70-72.

31.

Ibid., 55.

32.

Guenther Lewy , America in Vietnam ( Oxford , UK: Oxford University Press , 1978 ), 94.

33.

David Elliott , The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975 ( Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe , 2003), 147.

34.

Under the South Vietnamese administrative system, the “village” was a well-defined territorial unit. The term hamlet was used to identify clusters of habitation within villages. In some areas, hamlets were fixed to a particular surveyed and bounded territory; in other places, the “same” hamlet could shift location from place to place within a village. See Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, Research and Analysis Directorate (CORDS/RAD), Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), Document No. DAR R70-79, CM-01B (Saigon: Military Assistance Command Vietnam, NARA 3-349-81-001). The average Vietnamese village contained five hamlets.

35.

The HES was originally an attempt to systematize and digitize a less formal prior practice of the South Vietnamese government to assign letter ratings of the security status at the local level. See National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Hamlet Evaluation System (HAMLA) and Hamlet Evaluation System 1971 (HES 71), Records Group 330 (Washington, DC: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, NARA 3-330-75-141). Indeed, the South Vietnamese communists themselves developed a similar quantitative system for hamlet evaluation (Elliott, The Vietnamese War, 856-58).

36.

For further technical details on the HES, see Matthew Kocher , Human Ecology and Civil War (PhD diss., University of Chicago , 2004).

37.

Samuel Popkin , The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam ( Berkeley: University of California Press , 1979), 188-90.

38.

Bernard B. Fall , Viet-Nam Witness, 1953-66 ( New York: Praeger , 1966), 142.

39.

Pike, Viet Cong, 12.

40.

Some sources associate Hoa Hao with Theravada Buddhism, in contrast to the dominant Mahayana Buddhism of Vietnam.

41.

Fall, Viet-Nam Witness, 150.

42.

We define control as a monopoly on overt governmental functions. As a proxy for this concept, we use the HES security submodel 3A (collapsed from five categories to three), which is an index composed of a variety of questions about the presence or absence of government or rebel personnel or activity in the area of the hamlet. These “models” are indices constructed through sequential applications of Bayes' Rule. In effect, the prior value of the model is adjusted to reflect the probability of observing each individual item response conditional on the prior.

43.

The extremely high proportion of government-controlled hamlets will come as a surprise to many readers, given the common wisdom that the United States lost the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive of 1968. However, there is wide agreement in historical sources that the United States and the South Vietnamese government controlled most of South Vietnam by the end of 1971. See, for instance, Neil Sheehan , A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam ( New York: Vintage , 1988), 722; Elliott, The Vietnamese War. Some of this government advantage was lost as a result of the 1972 Easter Offensive, and South Vietnam eventually fell to a breakthrough of the North Vietnamese conventional army in 1975.

44.

This is consistent with Connor's observations: In the early 1960s, the Montagnards had been wooed by the promises of the Vietcong because of their resentment of Ngo Dinh Diem's forced assimilation policies. By 1969, however, this trend was being reversed. See Connor, “Ethnology and the Peace of South Asia,” 73.

45.

Although far from a perfect measure of development levels, television and radio antennae and motor vehicles are highly visible by air or in short visits to hamlets. During this period in Vietnam, televisions, radios, and motor vehicles were all luxury items to a greater or lesser degree. The index has a Cronbach's alpha of .69 in the 1969 data and an alpha of .76 in the 1971 data. Note: the 1969 data do not include the variable for radios.

46.

See Kocher, Human Ecology and Civil War, for technical details on the construction of this measure.

47.

In other words, all simulations reflect “typical” hamlets in all respects except ethnicity. We also assume the month of July. Altering the month does not change the results materially. Some of the differences between groups narrow slightly; this is an artifact of improving government control generally.

48.

Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon.”

49.

A.M. Savani , Visage et Images du Sud Viet-Nam ( Saigon: Imprimerie Française d'Outre Mer , 1955), 71.

50.

Pike, Viet Cong, 68-69. Besides these two sects, many smaller militias emerged in the 1940s, including the Mafia-like Binh Xuyên, the Barai nationalists, the Phat Dao Buu Son Ky Huong, and the Tinh Do Cu Si Phat Hôi. See Savani, Visage et Images, 71-105.

51.

Popkin, The Rational Peasant, 188.

52.

Pike, Viet Cong, 58-59.

53.

Gerald C. Hickey, Shattered World : Adaptation and Survival among Vietnam's Highland Peoples during the Vietnam War ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 1993).

54.

Pike, Viet Cong, 205.

55.

Visual inspection has one principal drawback: it does not allow us to estimate the relative importance of the variables examined. See Matthew Kocher, Human Ecology and Civil War, for technical details on the GIS used to construct these maps.

56.

Jeffrey Race , War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province ( Berkeley: University of California Press , 1973).

57.

R.V. Burks , The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1961); Kostas Gemenis , “Armed Collaboration, 1939—1945: Explaining Variation among Ethnic Groups” (unpublished paper).

58.

Stathis N. Kalyvas , “ The Ontology of `Political Violence,' Action and Identity in Civil Wars ,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-94 .

59.

By violence, we mean the intentional victimization of civilians, the primary indicator being homicides (another indicator is the mass deportation of civilians).

60.

Horowitz , Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 47; and Robert Dahl, Polyarchy ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press , 1971), 108.

61.

Douglas Dion , “ Competition and Ethnic Conflict: Artifactual? ” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41, no. 5 (1997): 647 . Note, as well, that the violence of interstate wars is never referred to as “ethnic violence,” even when the nation—states involved are composed of populations with distinct ethnic identities.

62.

F.A. Voigt , The Greek Sedition ( London: Hollis and Carter , 1949), 75.

63.

Rogers Brubaker and David Laitin , “ Ethnic and Nationalist Violence ,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 426 .

64.

“That political violence can be ethnic is well established, indeed too well established; how it is ethnic remains obscure ... Sustained attention needs to be paid to the forms and dynamics of ethnicization, to the many and subtle ways in which violence— and conditions, processes, activities, and narratives linked to violence—can take on ethnic hues.” See Brubaker and Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” 427.

65.

A possible testable formulation is as follows: the deeper the divisions, the more violent the resulting civil war. Kalyvas finds that prewar polarization in Greece, as measured by prewar electoral returns, does not predict levels of violence during the civil war, as measured by homicide rates, controlling for a host of other factors. See Stathis N. Kalyvas , “Incorporating Constructivist Propositions into Theories of Civil War” (unpublished paper, 2005).

66.

Brubaker and Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” 426.

67.

David D. Laitin , “ Secessionist Rebellion in the Former Soviet Union ,” Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 8 (2001): 839-61 .

68.

James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin , “ Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War ,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 75-86 . The issue has not been settled yet. See J.G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol , “ Ethnic Polarization, Potential Conflict and Civil War ,” American Economic Review 95, no. 3 (2005): 796-816 ; and Halvard Buhaug , Lars-Erik Cederman , and Jan Ketil Rod , “ Modeling Conflict in Center-Periphery Dyads ” (unpublished paper, 2006).

69.

James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin , “ Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity ,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 860 .

70.

Roy Licklider , “ Early Returns: Results of the First Wave of Statistical Studies of Civil War Termination ,” Civil Wars 1, no. 3 (1998): 126-27 .

71.

Quoted in Roger Dupuy, Les Chouans ( Paris: Hachette , 1997), 237.

72.

The actual micromechanisms of victimization may vary to include anything from goal-oriented action at the mass level (elimination, secession) to emotions (hatred, dehumanization), symbols and rituals, and goal-oriented action at the individual level (private profit, criminality).

73.

Raymond Boudon , “The Logic of Relative Frustration,” in Rationality and Revolution, ed. Michael Taylor ( Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press , 1988), 245-67.

74.

Dion, “Competition and Ethnic Conflict.”

75.

Deborah Bennett , Randomness ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1999), 3.

76.

Patricia Griffin , The Chinese Communist Treatment of Counterrevolutionaries: 1924-1949 ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1976), 144.

77.

Ibid., 34. Note that a person's behavior may not necessarily be predicted by her status.

78.

Barbara Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention ( New York: Columbia University Press , 1999); Steven David , “ Internal War: Causes and Cures ,” World Politics 49, no. 4 (1997): 552-76 .

79.

Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War ; David Laitin , “ National Revivals and Violence ,” European Journal of Sociology 36 (1995): 3-43 .

80.

Timur Kuran , “ Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution ,” Public Choice 61, no. 1 (1989): 41-74 ; Roger Petersen , Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe ( Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press , 2001).

81.

Gabriele Ranzato , ed., Guerre Fratricide: Le Guerre Civili in Età Contemporanea ( Torino: Bollati Boringhieri , 1994), xlii-xliii; Georg Simmel, Conflict ( Glencoe, IL: Free Press , 1955[1908]), 30.

82.

René Girard , Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press , 1987), 26.

83.

Thucydides , History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner ( London: Penguin , 1972), 236-45 (emphasis ours).

84.

Roger Cohen , Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo ( New York: Random House , 1998).

85.

John Darby , “ Intimidation and Interaction in a Small Belfast Community: The Water and the Fish,” in Political Violence: Ireland in a Comparative Perspective, ed. John Darby , Nicholas Dodge , and A. C. Hepburn ( Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press , 1990), 101.

86.

Tone Bringa, We Are All Neighbors, produced and directed by Debbie Christie (Public Media/Films Inc., 1993), videocassette, 52 min.

87.

Martha Crenshaw , “ The Effectiveness of Terrorism in the Algerian War,” in Terrorism in Context, ed. Martha Crenshaw ( University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press , 1995), 473-513.

88.

For example, see Camilo José Cela , Mazurka for Two Dead Men ( New York: New Directions , 1992).

89.

Tracy Chamoun , Au Nom du Père ( Paris: J.-C. Lattès , 1992), 23.

90.

Kalyvas, “Ontology of `Political Violence.'"

91.

Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War.

92.

Richard Cobb , Reactions to the French Revolution ( London: Oxford University Press , 1972), 123.

93.

Paul Brass , Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1997).

94.

Rory Stewart , “ Even in Iraq, All Politics Is Local ,” New York Times, July 13, 2006, sec. A, p. 23 .

95.

Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War.

96.

Kaufmann, “Intervention in Ethnic and Ideological Civil Wars.”

97.

Biddle, “ Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon ”; Barry Posen , “ The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict ,” Survival 35, no. 1 ( 1993): 27-47 .

98.

Suicide bombs and air strikes each account for about 12 percent of violent deaths, “other ordnance/explosion” accounts for about 14 percent, and gunshots account for 56 percent. Although guns may be used in indiscriminate violence, they are usually much more selective than bombs. See G. Burnham , R. Lafta , S. Doocy , and L. Roberts , “ Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey ,” The Lancet 368, no. 9545 (2006): 1421-28 .

99.

Population displacement and refugee flight differ from ethnic cleansing in two fundamental respects: first, populations may move toward areas controlled by the ethnic other rather than outside its territory (e.g., Kurds move to Turkish cities, not outside Turkey); and second, it is generally understood that once the insurgents are defeated, they may have the option of returning to their homes.

100.

Interestingly, because the patterns of violence predicted do emerge far more consistently in situations of mass riots and pogroms, we suspect that perceptions about the role of ethnic cleavages in civil wars are heavily influenced by invalid inductive extrapolations from riots (and a few high-profile civil wars such as in Yugoslavia) to the entire universe of ethnic civil wars.

101.

Eamon Collins (with Mick McGovern ), Killing Rage ( New York: Granta Books , 1999), 280.

102.

Mirta Núñez Díaz-Balart and Antonio Rojas Friend , Consejo de Guerra: Los Fusilamientos en el Madrid de la Posguerra (1939-1945) ( Madrid: Compañía Literaria , 1997 ), 15.

103.

Ranzato, Guerre Fratricide; and Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition, and Revolution: On Atrocities against the Clergy during the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Contemporary

History 33, no. 3 (1998): 355-69 .

104.

There are many ways to identify “ideological” identities in nonethnic environments. In countries where one party boycotted elections, such as post—World War II Greece and Colombia, individual electoral cards carry information about whether a person voted or not—hence, about his or her ideological identity. See Tina Rosenberg , Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America ( New York: Penguin , 1991), 41. The class cleavage may also carry visible marks. During the Russian Civil War, the whites would sometimes shoot workers, recognized by their “callused hands” (Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917 -1921) [ Oxford: Clarendon , 1996], 665). Similar practices are reported in Spain and Korea.

105.

Nonethnic civil wars can produce high levels of segregation. As a man from heavily secessionist Independence, Missouri, wrote his brother, “All the people are leaving here that are for the Union” (Quoted in Fellman, Inside War, 74). Lear reports that the anti-Japanese guerrillas in the Philippines “encouraged the migration of loyal Filipinos from the enemy-controlled areas to the unoccupied districts” (Elmer Lear, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, Leyte, 1941-1945, Data Paper No. 42, Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1961], 120). A pro-Japanese administrator reported, “At present there are only 30 families in the población and our efforts to increase the number of returning families meet with little success because guerrilla elements controlling the barrios outside the población are prohibiting or preventing the people to come in, or have contract with the authorities. They threaten to kill, kidnap, punish, or inflict injuries to those who are attached to, and cooperate with, the present regime” (Ibid., 208).

106.

Caleb Donaldson and Martha Minow , “ Relearning Vietnam's Painful Lessons ,” The Boston Globe, August 14, 2006 , sec. A, p. 11 .

107.

Anthony Shadid , “ This Is Baghdad. What could be worse ?” Washington Post, October 29, 2006 , sec. B, p. 1 .

108.

Bob Woodward , State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III ( New York: Simon and Schuster , 2006), 419.

109.

Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher , “How Free Is `Free Riding' in Civil Wars? Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem” (working paper, 2006).

110.

Kalyvas, Logic of Violence in Civil War.

111.

A strong state could be federal or decentralized; however, a loose association of a Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish entity, such as that advocated by Gelb in “Last Train from Baghdad,” does not amount to a strong state.