The NYT's David Carr recalls how earlier in his career, he told the aggrieved subject of one story, "is it worse that I said it, or worse that it’s true?" And so it goes with calling the Iraq situation a civil war.
The war over words and definitions is not a new one. The current administration has fought to maintain custody of the Iraqi conflict by defining insurgents as “terrorists” and prisoners of war as “unlawful combatants.” During Vietnam, the administration defined civilian casualties as “collateral damage.”
And even the term civil war remains freighted with meaning in American culture. When I was traveling in the South and used the term to describe the war between the North and South, an elderly woman corrected me, saying, “Do you mean the war of Yankee aggression?” And that was only a few years ago.
There are those who suggest that there is something vaguely seditious in describing the situation in Iraq as a civil war. (The Los Angeles Times preceded NBC across the threshold by a few days but did not blow the trumpets when it did so.) ...
On closer inspection, what seems like a bold, transgressive step by the media is considerably less. It is not a coincidence that some members of the mainstream media were only willing to attempt to redefine the terms of the current debate after a massive electoral setback to the current administration.
All the way back in March — the point when many commentators say an actual civil war began — a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent of respondents believed that sectarian violence would lead to a civil war. The willingness to use “civil war” now is less a brave declaration than a wet, sensitive finger in the wind because mainstream media is much more likely to follow, than lead, political debate.