Civil War Intervention and the Problem of Iraq1

Abstract

Outside intervention in civil warfare is important for humanitarian, theoretical, and practical policy reasons-since 2006, much of the debate over the war in Iraq has turned on the danger of external intervention if the United States were to withdraw. Yet, the literature on intervention has been compartmented in ways that have made it theoretically incomplete and unsuitable as a guide to policy. We therefore integrate and expand upon the theoretical and empirical work on intervention and apply the results to the policy debate over the US presence in Iraq using a Monte Carlo simulation to build upon the dyadic results of probit analysis. We find that Iraq is, in fact, a significantly intervention-prone conflict in an empirical context; the prospect of a wider, regional war in the event that violence returns in the aftermath of US withdrawal cannot safely be ignored.

Regional Power Role and Intervention: The Turkish Case Over Syria in the 2000s

“…The humanitarian aspect of the Syrian crisis has been impossible to overlook, particularly in view of the crowds of refugees coming to Turkey and the existence of close family and ethnic ties between the people on both sides of the Syrian–Turkish border. This situation also accords well with empirical findings that any state which “shares a land border with the civil war state is more likely to experience spillover effects”, such as the flow of refugees (Biddle, Friedman, & Long, 2012, p. 91). Just after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Turkey started to shelter thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the Assad government’s repression.…”

Predicting the duration of the Syrian insurgency

“…To the best of our knowledge, however, there are no systematic predictions of the length of the Syrian insurgency, despite the importance of such an exercise for policymakers and scholars alike. 2 For example, insights on the duration of the Syrian insurgency could help us anticipate whether we will see military intervention by Syria’s neighbours (Biddle et al., 2012), or whether neighbouring countries will be destabilized through continuous refugee flows or ethno-sectarian polarization along Sunni–Shia lines (see International Crisis Group, 2012b).…”

Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats

“…Second, a considerable amount of recent empirical work uses data at the level of local communities and subnational geographic regions to evaluate the impact of different types of COIN strategies. These studies rely mostly on recent conflicts in Iraq (Berman, Shapiro, and Felter 2011; Biddle, Friedman, and Long 2012; Condra and Shapiro 2012), Afghanistan (Condra et al 2010; Hultman 2012; Sexton 2016), and the Caucasus (Lyall 2009; Toft and Zhukov 2012), although some also make use of microlevel data from the Vietnam War (Kalyvas and Kocher 2009; Kocher, Pepinsky, and Kalyvas 2011). While these studies offer superior approaches to estimating local effects with proper identification, their external validity is limited by design and does not allow researchers to draw conclusions about broader trends.…”