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Perhaps there's one out there that it meets ...
Ethnic cleansing, terror, it can be many things. But I usually think of civil war as the attempt of a militia or army battling another militia or army to take territory in the name of something that has pretensions to being a competing government and extending its influence over all the territory the government claims. Civilians may be targeted, but usually in order to cripple the war effort's procurement of materiel, not to sap the populace's will. It's not much different from a normal war, except that everybody around it looks at the boundaries, and say that it's 'within' a state instead of 'between' two states.
It's certainly ethnic violence; there's certainly the desire on the part of Sunni Arabs (not as a group, but as a collection of groups falsely appearing to have a joint goal) to want their traditional domination over other groups. There's certainly the desire on the part of Shi'ite Arabs, mostly religious, to want to dominate the Sunni part of the country. Of course, the Kurds are the intended subjects of nearly everybody oppression, but that's a given.
Most of the violence that's not targeting insurgents/army/police, IMHO, is for one of two reasons: (1) just to kill the other side because, well, they're 'wrong' and deserve to die; or because communal and tribal notions of justice, honor and revenge require it. (2) To either clear an area that can be freed of the 'wrong' kind of person, or to cause the 'wrong kind of pepole' to simply give up and submit: in one kind of thinking, to properly submit to the divine order of things; in a second kind of thinking, to properly submit to the ideologically correct order of things, whether Ba'thist or majoritarianist. Come to think of it, that also accounts for much of the violence targeting army and police, and possibly also insurgents.
This is still run-up to a civil war. The militias are still covert, for the most part, and in some cases rather minimally organized, and it's unclear where all the fault lines actually lie in the Sunni and Shi'ite communities. It's not far from being Somalia or Afghanistan post-Soviet-pullout, and it could still get there, but there's no reason to rush. The carnage might be less in an actual civil war, but that's far from clear.
People are constantly pointing out every time the US military kills an Iraqi that tribal notions of justice require vengeance and remembering the offence; they less often point out that the view is also quite communal in nature. And many forget that the same view holds within Iraqi society, so all the 'collateral damage' that the insurgents are causing, all the dead police, students, women, kids, civilians ... all produce people more than willing to blow up, shoot, stab and behead the other side. Diyya provides a way out, as would prison time for the perps; but each side views submitting as dishonorable. There's no state.
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