'œForget the debate over what to do about the war in Iraq,' said Peter Baker in The Washington Post. The White House would rather argue over what to call it. Despite the growing number of news media, politicians, and scholars who now refer to the violence as a civil war, the Bush administration refuses to use the term. The Sunnis and Shiites are fighting 'œto express differences,' the White House says, not to achieve clear political goals, so it's not a classic civil war. It's a rather arbitrary distinction, said Geoffrey Nunberg in the Los Angeles Times, but it has real political import. 'œPeople think of insurgencies and insurrections as things that can be suppressed or defeated.' To define the violence in Iraq with a charged phrase like 'œcivil war,' on the other hand, would be to admit that military victory is impossible, and that our troops are now caught between a backward nation's warring Islamic sects.
How dumb does the White House think Americans are? asked USA Today in an editorial. No semantic legerdemain can hide the fact that Iraq has descended into chaos. Roving death squads and car-bombings are filling Baghdad's streets with bodies. 'œU.S. troops are shot at by Sunnis when they try to defend Shiites and by Shiites when they try to defend Sunnis.' The butchery is compounded by numerous splinter groups, criminal gangs, and foreign fighters aligned with al Qaida, all ruthlessly engaged in murdering civilians and killing the foreign occupiers—our soldiers. If anything, 'œ'civil war' is too simple a term to describe what's happening.'
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