Matt Lauer of NBC said his network would start referring to what's happening in Iraq as a civil war. Revolutionary, eh? Except the NYT and Washington Post have been doing so for months without fanfare.

An excerpt from The Guardian story:

The Bush administration appeared yesterday to be losing its fight to stop the US media calling the escalating violence in Iraq a civil war after one of the main television networks formally announced it would break the taboo.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times have been using the phrase for a while without fanfare, but on Monday NBC News used one of its best-known presenters, Matt Lauer, to declare the network's semantic defiance of the White House. "After careful consideration, NBC News has decided a change in terminology is warranted, that the situation in Iraq, with armed, militarised factions fighting for their own political agendas, can now be characterised as civil war," Lauer, the host of the Today show, said.

Bill Keller, the New York Times' executive editor, said: "It's hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war."

With rival sectarian militias fighting over Baghdad district by district, other US news organisations have said they were reconsidering their policies on the highly politicised issue, but the administration stuck to its position. Speaking at the opening of the Nato summit in Latvia yesterday, George Bush refused to accept the "civil war" label, arguing that the conflict was being artificially stoked.

"There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by al-Qaida, causing people to seek reprisals," he said.

His national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, was more explicit in countering the "civil war" terminology. "The Iraqis don't talk of it as a civil war, the unity government doesn't talk of it as a civil war," Mr Hadley said. "At this point in time the army and the police have not fractured along sectarian lines, which is what you've seen elsewhere, and the government continues to be holding together and has not fractured on sectarian terms."

But interviews printed in the US press suggest that many Iraqis believe a civil war is under way. Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister, said in March: "We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more - if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." The death rate has since doubled and to many in Iraq the debate over words appears a grotesque quibble, but the choice of language has far-reaching significance in the US, where public support for military involvement is dwindling.

One expert quoted in the story said the Bush administration knows Americans don't want to be involved in other countries' civil war, so it is desperately trying to avoid the Iraq conflict from being considered a civil war.