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What's this?A: The Bush administration says no. NBC says yes. I think NBC is correct.
When Professor News was an undergraduate attending Georgetown University, the Jesuit fathers taught us to define our terms. So what is a "civil war"?
Webster's New College Dictionary calls it a "war between geographical sections or political factions of the same nation."
Political scientists say certain criteria must be met for a conflict to be called a civil war: The contending forces must be from the same country, fighting for control of the central government or over separation from the central government, and that at least 1,000 have been killed, with a minimum of 100 on each side.
It seems to me the conflict in Iraq certainly fits these and the other usual definitions of civil war.
NBC News caused a stir last week when it became the first national television news operation to use the term "civil war" in covering Iraq. Matt Lauer said on the "Today" show, "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 agenda, can now be characterized as civil war."
Lauer said two Muslim groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are using violence against each other and that the Iraqi government is unable to protect the people. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an NBC consultant, added, "Well, Matt, to be
The Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor have been describing the conflict as a civil war. Times Foreign Editor Marjorie Miller told the Associated Press: "It's a very simple calculation. It's a country that's tearing itself apart, one group against another group or several groups against several groups. What country even admits that it is in the midst of a civil war?"
Relevant to that point, for decades after our own Civil War, Southerners referred to it as the "War Between the States" (many still do) and Northerners called it the "War of Southern Rebellion."
Nicholas Sambanis, a political scientist at Yale who specializes in the study of civil wars, told The New York Times that the Iraq conflict "should have been called a civil war a long time ago. The level of violence is so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since 1945."
The Bush administration insists that Iraq is not in a civil war. President Bush last week dismissed such a characterization. "There's all kinds of speculation about what may or may not be happening," he told reporters at the NATO summit in Latvia.
Press Secretary Tony Snow and other White House spokesmen have added more criteria to the definition: There must be a struggle for territory and anti-government forces must be unified under one leader. "Sectarian strife" and "insurgent violence" are the preferred terms.
For the most part, the news media have gone along with the administration's vocabulary.
Why the aversion to "civil war"? Apparently, the administration fears the term may suggest to the American public that our forces are caught in the middle of another country's internal struggle and should not be there.
Even in this age of moving images on screens big and small, words are important.
The government, under any administration, knows this. That's why the Agriculture Department last month stopped describing Americans without enough to eat as "hungry." It said they were not experiencing hunger, but "low food security." Paul Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. He can be heard at 8:35 a.m. Thursdays on WNPR Connecticut Public Radio, including 90.5 FM in Hartford/New Haven. You can reach him via e-mail at paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.
