By Geoff Earle
December 20, 202:
Information Clearing House
-- "Daily
Mail"
A political science professor who serves on a
panel that advises the CIA on when countries might
slide into civil war amid factors like undemocratic
tendencies has identified the U.S. as farther down
that potential path than many could imagine.
'We are closer to
civil war than any of us would like to believe,'
said Dr. Barbara Walter, who serves on the Political
Instability Task Force, which guides intelligence
analysts on countries overseas that might be on the
brink of conflict.
The University of
California San Diego academic, who has studied
hotspots like
Syria and helps run a blog on political
violence, said the U.S. meets several of the
telltale signs that are part of a road to
insurgency.
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'No one wants to
believe that their beloved democracy is in decline,
or headed toward war,' she writes in her forthcoming
book, How Civil Wars Start.
'If you were an
analyst in a foreign country looking at events in
America — the same way you’d look at events in
Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would
go down a checklist, assessing each of the
conditions that make civil war likely. And what you
would find is that the United States, a democracy
founded more than two centuries ago, has entered
very dangerous territory,' she writes, according to
the
Washington Post.
She concludes that the
U.S. has gone through the 'pre-insurgency' and
'incipient conflict' phases – without deciding
whether the Jan. 6th Capitol riot constitutes part
of the 'open insurgency' phase.
She also labels the U.S. as an 'anocracy' – a
category between a democracy and an autocracy,
after a slide based on factors in its criteria
during the four years of the Trump
administration – with the U.S. falling from a
score of 10 to a score of 5.
That put the nation
far behind its traditional peers.
'We are no longer the
world’s oldest continuous democracy,” according to
Walter. “That honor is now held by Switzerland,
followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no
longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica,
and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity
index.”
Three retired US
generals issued a warning of their own on Friday,
fearing a potential split in the military might play
out in a civil war if there is a coup attempt after
2024.
They pointed to 'signs
of potential turmoil in our armed forces,' and noted
that a 'disturbing number' of active-duty members of
the military took part in the Capitol riot,
accounting for more than 1 in 10 people charged.
Former Army Major Gen.
Paul Eaton, former Brigadier Gen. Steven Anderson
and former Army Major Gen. Antonio Taguba outlined
their concerns in a
Washington Post op-ed.
'The potential for a
total breakdown of the chain of command along
partisan lines — from the top of the chain to squad
level — is significant should another insurrection
occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among
themselves to support the “rightful” commander in
chief cannot be dismissed.'
The added: ''As we
approach the first anniversary of the deadly
insurrection at the US Capitol, we - all of us
former senior military officials - are increasingly
concerned about the aftermath of the 2024
presidential election and the potential for lethal
chaos inside our military, which would put all
Americans at severe risk,' the generals penned.
'We are chilled to our
bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next
time,' they added.
The U.S. in November
appeared on the list of 'backsliding democracies'
compiled by the Stockholm-based International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
According to the
report, 'The United States, the bastion of global
democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies
itself, and was knocked down a significant number of
steps on the democratic scale.'
It called Trump's
repeated attacks on the validity of the 2020
election results a 'historic turning point' that
''undermined fundamental trust in the electoral
process' that precipitated the riot and had
'spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico,
Myanmar and Peru, among others.'
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.),
who serves on the select Jan. 6th committee, in a
new New Yorker profile describes Trump's role last
year as initiating a 'self-coup.'
'The scariest of the
three rings is the inside of the coup. I use that
word, "coup," knowing that it’s not the usual
political parlance,' he said. 'A coup usually takes
place against
an elected President. This was a President moving
against a Vice-President–it was, as the political
scientists call it, a ‘self-coup,’" he said of
Trump's efforts to get Mike Pence not to count votes
from states where Trump was claiming fraud
occurred.
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