Stanford Report, January 18, 2006

In Print and On the Air

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow LARRY DIAMOND is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Bush administration filed Jan. 17 by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit. The New York Times reported Jan. 16 that the ACLU lawsuit, as well as a suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the government's domestic-eavesdropping program. Both groups want the courts to order an immediate end to the program, which they say is illegal. The Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of the surveillance program. According to Diamond, a Stanford student studying in Egypt conducted research for him on political opposition groups and he worried that communications between them on sensitive political topics could be monitored. "How can we communicate effectively if you risk being intercepted by the National Security Agency?" he is quoted as asking.

Political science Professor JAMES FEARON told the Los Angeles Times Jan. 1 that Iraq's civil war began almost as soon as Saddam Hussein was ousted but that it is obscured and partly held back by the presence of foreign forces. "I think there is definitely a civil war that has been going on since we finished the major combat operations," he is quoted as saying. "When people talk about 'Will there be a civil war?' they are really talking about a different type of civil war." The kind of war emerging in Iraq, characterized by guerrilla attacks, kidnappings, assassinations and "ethnic cleansing," is typical of modern civil conflicts, Fearon said. "Since 1945, almost all civil wars, a big plurality, have been guerrilla wars where it is kind of insurgency versus counterinsurgency," he said. "Most civil wars look more like what we are seeing in Iraq now." The presence of U.S. troops in the conflict would not be unusual, he added. "A great number [of civil wars] have involved foreign intervention. But I would still call it a civil war on grounds that the insurgents are attacking and killing far more Iraqis than U.S. troops." The Times reported that about 1,000 Iraqis are dying each month, most of them killed by fellow Iraqis. While a too-rapid departure by U.S. forces would catalyze wider civil war, Fearon said, staying indefinitely gives Iraqis scant incentive to "get their political and military act together." "I think the U.S. presence makes it possible that you could have talks that result in a government that could function at some level, but the kind of depressing thing is that I don't see talks leading to a government that could clearly survive without a pretty strong U.S. presence," he said. As things stand now, "there is no real nice exit for the U.S."