NBC's done it. The New York Times says it's doing it, sparingly. Even The Miami Herald's parent company, McClatchy, has joined the fray:
News organizations have suddenly began challenging a Bush administration taboo and are now terming the bloodshed in Iraq as a ''civil war'' -- a development, analysts say, that could change the way Americans both think about and wage that conflict.
White House spokesman Tony Snow rejects the label, calling the conflict ``sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences.''
But NBC Today show host Matt Lauer illustrated the move against using Bush administration terminology on Monday in a brief post-Thanksgiving weekend announcement to viewers:
``After careful consideration, NBC News has decided that a change in terminology is warranted, that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as civil war.''
The Los Angeles Times, for its part, claimed the title of ''first,'' however, noting in an article Tuesday that it ``began to refer to the hostilities as a civil war in October, without public fanfare.''
Editors at The Miami Herald, as of today, were still debating which term to use -- despite the Washington bureau of its parent company, McClatchy Newspapers, adopting the label.
''Neighborhood by neighborhood, Baghdad descends into civil war,'' said a weekend dispatch from Iraq posted on the McClatchy website.
For his part, President Bush Tuesday avoided the debate in remarks from the road in Estonia, when a reporter asked directly: ``What is the difference between what we're seeing now in Iraq and civil war?''
Bush: ``What you're seeing on TV has started last February. It was an attempt by people to foment sectarian violence, and no -- no question it's dangerous there, and violent.''
For the record, Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition -- the authoritative source at The Miami Herald -- defines a civil war this way:
War between geographical sections or political factions of the same nation. It cites as an example the war between the North and the South in the United States, 1861-65, which at the time was known as The War Between the States.
Several years of escalating bloodshed in Iraq have been largely ethnically based, with a geographic component. Shiite Muslims live in Iraq's south, closer to Iran, and Sunnis live in the central part of the nation, with both sects sharing the capital Baghdad. Kurds form the third Iraqi ethnic group.
But, experts say, the media is now taking issue with the Bush administration, which has for months used its Beltway pulpit from the Pentagon to the White House to dispute the characterization.
''I don't see this as something that was the government's prerogative to call. It's semantics, for heaven's sake,'' said Steve Hess, professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
He called the consequences ''profound,'' especially in terms of television's use of the term civil war: ``Are you asking Americans to die for something between Sunnis and Shiites?''
Part of the issue is perception. For months, if not years, of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration alternately cast the violence as the last gasp of insurgents loyal to the toppled Saddam Hussein -- or the work of outside anti-American radicals loosely aligned with al Qaeda.
U.S. casualty reports still characterize American military dead in Iraq as killed in combat or by car bombs, called improvised explosive devices.
But the focus of news coverage of late has been the widespread violence that kills Iraqis -- not U.S. forces.
''This is unquestionably a civil war and it's been a civil war for at least a year,'' said Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. ``By any definition that political scientists use, this is an easy call.''
The classic definition of a civil war requires three elements, he said: Warfare between contestants internal to a state; a conflict that has killed more than 1,000 people; at least 100 dead on each side among those 1,000 dead.
But, he said, the Bush administration cannot accept the term because ``it's a lot more than semantics -- it's tantamount to an admission of failure, because of the way it was cast at the beginning: Success as democracy and defeat as civil war.''
Conceding that Iraqis are engaging in a civil war, he said, would require a different kind of strategy than has been fought so far.
Hess, who has written widely about the topic, defended the right of ''serious mainstream media'' to define it that way ``after serious internal discussion.''
''The media have their people on the ground, too, and are presumably qualified or perhaps more qualified to make that judgment,'' he said. ``They're not inside the Green Zone, or at least not all the time.
McClatchy Washington Editor David Westphal said the bureau used the term in a headline on its website Monday even before NBC's shift.
McClatchy news reports had earlier quoted a range of opinions -- from U.S. troops inside Iraq this summer to foreign affairs analysts abroad -- as characterizing the bloodshed as ``civil war.''
So the expression seemed a logical outgrowth of spiraling internal violence, which spiked over the weekend, he said.
''The White House has obviously made a big deal about saying it's not a civil war. But in our discussions here there was not a whole lot of argument that this thing did not constitute a civil war,'' said Westphal.
``It emerged from the reporting in Baghdad and in Iraq. And in our discussions here about it we didn't feel like we would have a prohibition on it.''
But, he added, it was neither a McClatchy policy to use the term, nor a ''company-wide edict'' that its newspapers follow.
Besides The Miami Herald, McClatchy also owns the Sacramento and Fresno Bees, The Kansas City Star, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Raleigh News & Observer, among 32 newspapers.
'What's going on in Iraq is so awful that a dispute over whether the term is `civil war' is innocuous to me,'' Westphal said. ``The facts of the carnage, of the strife there are so profound that civil war doesn't quite even cover it.''
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said his newspaper decided to use the term when ''appropriate'' after consulting ``our reporters in the field and the editors who directly oversee this coverage.''
''We expect to use the phrase sparingly and carefully, not to the exclusion of other formulations, not for dramatic effect,'' he said.
He cast the conflict in Iraq as complex: a civil war, an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, among others.
'We believe `civil war' should not become reductionist shorthand for a war that is colossally complicated,'' Keller said.
The emerging trend this week toward terming it a civil war follows months of back and forth between the Bush administration and reporters.
In March, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a Pentagon news briefing that ''terrorists'' in Iraq were trying ''to foment civil strife'' by targeting religious shrines.
``But the Iraqis are meeting that test thus far successfully, I would say, and defying the seeming rush to -- by some here and abroad -- to proclaim exactly what the terrorists seek, namely a civil war.''
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By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Over White House objections, The New York Times and other U.S. news outlets have adopted the term "civil war" for the fighting in Iraq, reflecting a growing consensus that sectarian violence has engulfed the country.
After NBC News' widely publicized decision on Monday to brand the conflict a civil war, several prominent newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, pointed to their use of the phrase.
"It's hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war," New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a statement.
The Bush administration has for months resisted the notion that Iraq is embroiled in a civil war, a position analysts say is hard to justify. Experts predict a shift in language could deepen public discontent with U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Asked at a news conference in Estonia on Tuesday what the difference was between the current bloodshed and civil war, President George W. Bush said the latest bombings were part of a 9-month-old pattern of attacks by al Qaeda militants aimed at fomenting sectarian violence by provoking retaliation.
White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said the Iraqis "don't talk of it as a civil war" because the army and police had not fractured along sectarian lines and the government continued to hold together.
U.S. officials' reluctance to use the words "civil war" is more than a semantic difference. The phrase carries a political dimension as well because it could further weaken Americans' support for a war that has already helped remove Bush's Republican Party from control of Congress.
Sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites has increased dramatically this year. Multiple bombings in a Shi'ite neighborhood of Baghdad last Thursday killed more than 200 people and drew reprisal attacks in Sunni neighborhoods.
Analysts say the U.S. public will not tolerate troops being used as referees between warring Iraqi factions.
MSNBC, NBC's cable network, on Tuesday displayed a graphic reading "Iraq: The Civil War" in its Iraq coverage. Other U.S. networks said they would continue reporting under broader terms like "War in Iraq."
The shift in coverage reflects a growing consensus among foreign-policy experts that the conflict is a civil war, said American University communications professor Chris Simpson.
"When those elites shift, the media typically follows," Simpson said. "To some extent the media do play a role in shaping that opinion, but mostly they follow it."
The Los Angeles Times said it had adopted the term in October "without public fanfare," making it the first major news outlet to use the term.
The Christian Science Monitor and McClatchy Newspapers, which include the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, are among the other newspapers that have described the bloodshed as a civil war.
The New York Times said it would use the term sparingly and not to the exclusion of other labels, as the conflict also has elements of an insurgency, an occupation, a battle against terrorism and "a scene of criminal gangsterism."
The Washington Post said it has no policy to describe the conflict.
CNN, ABC and CBS said some of their correspondents have referred to the rising sectarian violence as a civil war, or examined the debate among experts over whether the term is appropriate.
The decision not to label the conflict a civil war "does not in any way diminish the sheer volume of reporting we're doing from there," ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said. "That reporting certainly points toward civil war."
A Fox News spokeswoman said, "We have no plans to change our usage."
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2006; Page A16
The carnage in Iraq is "sectarian violence," President Bush says. It's a "struggle for freedom," the "central front in the war on terror." It is not, no matter how much it may look like it, a civil war.
Forget the debate over what to do about the war in Iraq. The White House is still debating what to call the war in Iraq. With retired generals, analysts, politicians and pundits increasingly using the term "civil war," the Bush administration insists that the definition does not fit as part of its latest effort to control the words of war.
To people dying in the streets of Sadr City, it may be just semantics. But the White House fiercely resists the phrase out of fear of its impact in both Iraq and the United States. Defining it as civil war, some strategists worry, could accelerate the conflict and encourage Iraqi factions that remain on the sidelines to join the struggle. And acknowledging that it has become a civil war, they fear, could collapse the already weak support for the mission among Americans.
But the risk for the White House, analysts said, is that once again it will appear out of touch with reality over there and with public perception here at home. For months after the invasion of Iraq, the administration denied there was an insurgency. Then it resisted the notion that there was sectarian violence. Now polls show that about two-thirds of the American public think that Iraq is mired in civil war.
"If they can't characterize what's going on in Iraq in an honest fashion, we can't begin to address the problem," retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who led troops in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said in an interview.
Asked about the matter at a news conference in Estonia yesterday, Bush skirted the issue and focused attention on al-Qaeda's role. "No question, it's tough," he said. "No question about it. There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place -- fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by al-Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal."
White House press secretary Tony Snow rejected the term "civil war" on Monday because "you have not yet had a situation . . . where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power but for territory."
The issue of terminology has arisen periodically for months, especially since the February bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra touched off round after round of attacks between the once-dominant minority Sunnis and the majority Shiites who now control the government. The debate has flared more intensely in recent days amid the bloodiest assaults of the war in the Shiite slum of Baghdad known as Sadr City. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warned Monday that when it comes to civil war, "we are almost there."
The decision by NBC News on Monday to use the term despite White House objections prompted a fresh examination by many in Washington about the nature of the conflict. As MSNBC began flashing the logo "Iraq: The Civil War," other news organizations staked out positions. The Los Angeles Times noted that it has been calling the violence a civil war since October. The New York Times said it will use the term, though sparingly. The Associated Press said it is still debating the issue, while The Washington Post has made no policy.
The Random House unabridged dictionary defines a civil war as "a war between political factions or regions within the same country." Scholars often further refine that to those conflicts that take at least 1,000 lives. Those who argue that Iraq does not qualify say that a true civil war involves organized military units contesting for territory on behalf of competing governments or quasi-governments.
"In American history, in the Civil War, you had borders and you had two sides," said Michael Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "I don't see anything like that. There's lots of people killing lots of other people, yes. Why not call it a terror war? That seems to cover it."
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Bush would rather frame it in the terrorism context to preserve public support. "If it's a civil war and only a small portion of it involves al-Qaeda operatives, then it's suddenly not the central front in the war on terror, it's a struggle by Iraqis for political power," he said. "That means the rationales for this are severely undercut."
Polls suggest that most Americans have already settled this debate in their minds -- 61 percent of those surveyed in September by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal described the situation in Iraq as a civil war, while 65 percent agreed in a CNN poll and 72 percent in a Gallup poll. Of those who described the conflict as "out of control" and a "civil war" in a later Gallup-USA Today poll, 84 percent called U.S. involvement a mistake, compared with 25 percent of those who did not view the situation that way.
"There's a good deal of research to suggest that the American public is less willing to use troops to intervene in other countries' civil wars than in humanitarian-type missions," said Christopher F. Gelpi, a Duke University scholar who has studied public opinion in wartime. "So even if the facts on the ground are the same . . . the label used has a substantial effect on public opinion. That's why they're fighting over it."
Language also has the power to influence events in Iraq, where leaders engage in a similar debate. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," former prime minister Ayad Allawi said as far back as eight months ago. But the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, adamantly rejects the term, and analysts said his fragile government risks collapsing if it accepts the premise.
"There is a very tenuous and very weak hold on legitimacy," said Peter Khalil, a Eurasia Group consultant who served as a U.S. security adviser in Iraq. "If they were to admit that, then that last strand gets unraveled. You're not far off from falling off the ledge."
Kurt M. Campbell, a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, said many key players in Iraq have not engaged in violence but could decide to weigh in if they think the conflict has evolved into an all-out struggle for power -- which means the Iraqis and Americans have a legitimate reason to fear the disputed phrase.
"It may trigger the thing you're trying to forestall," he said. "It's not simply a matter of political correctness and trying to avoid harsh reaction." But Campbell, who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it may soon be too late. "Where we're at right now is so close to all-out civil unrest that in the next few weeks if it continues the way it's going, it'll be all but unavoidable."
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