A War Most Civil

NBC had decided that it will begin referring to the sectarian violence in Iraq as a civil war. The LA Times began doing so last month. Others will certainly follow, but in doing so they’ll simply be reaching the same conclusion that many people reached a long time ago. Iraq is, and has been for quite some time, in the midst of a deadly civil war.

It’s an easy call to me. Iraq is being torn up by one armed faction of Iraqis fighting against another armed faction of Iraqis every day, including fighting against the government and its security forces, with thousands being killed every month. That’s a civil war. What else does it take to earn that opprobrious designation?

The Bush administration and the Iraqi prime minister reject this toe tag. They choose instead to refer to the current status of the conflict as a “new stage of sectarian conflict”. Okay. A shit-storm by any other name still smells the same. This morning the president offered the counter-explanation that al-Qaeda is to blame for the sectarian violence. Interesting theory – I guess that means that al-Qaeda has embedded itself in both the Sunni and Shiite sects where it then shoots at itself day after day. The only other option under the president’s explanation is that ad-Qaeda is operating on only one side of the sectarian equation, thereby making the other side the victim of their involvement. That leaves me wondering which side al-Qaeda is on, because I’m seeing nasty perps on both sides and precious few victims among those who are doing the killing on either side of this sectarian abyss.

The U.S. and Iraqi governments are understandably averse to this designation because they’re directly implicated in both the existence of the escalating conflict and in the inability to end it. Of course there’s also a huge policy issue at stake in this little semantic debate – i.e., if this is a civil war, then what is the United States doing in the middle of it? We don’t do civil wars. But, rather than face that issue, our leaders elect to call it something else, apparently thinking that they’re fooling the rest of us with their linguistic sleight-of-hand.

Frankly, they can’t even be fooling themselves on this one. After all, U.S. military and political leaders have been talking publicly about Iraq “slipping into” or “sliding toward” a “possible” civil war for the last 12 – 18 months. Well, it’s time for all the kids in the backyard to agree that we’ve reached the end of the Wham-o Slip ‘N Slide period in Iraq. We’ve hit dry ground, gang; there’ll be no more slipping and sliding.

A most uncivil conflict has become a civil war, indeed.