civil whatnow?
More historical agnorance from Tom Toles:
How ironic. To make the point that there really is a civil war taking place in Iraq, he appeals to the Establishment name for a conflict that was not a civil war by any definition that existed before 1860.
Iraqi factions are fighting for power over each other. That's a civil war.
The southern states were not trying to conquer Washington DC and rule the North.
Even if you support the Union invasion of the South, even if you think Abe Lincoln was a hero and that the good guys won, simple decency and the most basic level of intellectual honesty should force you to recognize that it was a war of secession; it was no more a civil war than was the conflict of the 1770s.
How ironic. To make the point that there really is a civil war taking place in Iraq, he appeals to the Establishment name for a conflict that was not a civil war by any definition that existed before 1860.
Iraqi factions are fighting for power over each other. That's a civil war.
The southern states were not trying to conquer Washington DC and rule the North.Even if you support the Union invasion of the South, even if you think Abe Lincoln was a hero and that the good guys won, simple decency and the most basic level of intellectual honesty should force you to recognize that it was a war of secession; it was no more a civil war than was the conflict of the 1770s.
2 Comments:
It's ironic, also, how many people didn't want the US to withdraw because, while the US "Civil War" was, in their minds, necessary, it would be terrible for Iraq to have a civil war.
Why didn't they want Iraq to have a US-style Civil War, anyway? Because 650,000 people might die?
Now that Iraq is descending into civil war, despite the US being there to supposedly stop it, I wonder if the regime change architects will see it all as a Lincolnian necessity.
Actually, I'm not convinced that "civil war" is an inaccurate description of the 1861-65 conflict. As far as I can see, "civil war" doesn't necessarily mean a war in which both factions are seeking to control the same government; it just means a war between different factions in the same country or society. At least so says my dicitonary, and so say most uses of the term.
Now you might say that if the South was seceding then they weren't part of the "same country or society." But without getting into the question of whether the South actually seceded or merely attempted unsuccessfully to secede (after the war it was Southerners who mae the cae for the latter, in order to remain under constitutional protection), I don't think we should define "same country or society" too legalistically. It was a war in which brother fought against brother, in which the leading generals were trained in the same military academy, etc. So it was more of a civil war than the American Revolution, but I think that too had civil-war aspects.
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