What's So Civil About the Iraq War?

This week, NBC announced officially that from henceforward it was going to be referring to the Iraq War as a "civil war." Matt Lauer of the Today Show was chosen to make the announcement to show just how weighty and important this decision is. Clearly, Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News just doesn't possess the necessary gravitas.

But I must say I don't think this war is very civil at all. How can you call a war civil when over 600,000 Iraqi civilians have died according to one estimate, more than 3,000 American troops, 65 just this month, have been killed, and which has devolved into a situation where it's practically brother against brother? It seems to me to be a very odd sort of terminology. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow prefers to regard what is going in Iraq as "sectarian violence operations," which makes a lot more sense, even if it doesn't flow quite as trippingly over the tongue, while Fox News refers to the situation as "snowballing sectarian violence," which fittingly reminds me of the very violent winters I suffered through as a child as the victim of many a bully's icy projectiles.

I never believed the American Civil War should be called a civil war either, although Ken Burns made it all seem so civil in his documentary, with the very literate letters read by movie stars with sonorous voices, the evocative music and the very slow pans over lovely black and white photographs. Watching that documentary you would never know that 620,000 soldiers died in the war, 51,000 at Gettysburg alone. I grew up in the South where we referred to the war, which I had always had the impression occurred in the 1960s rather than the 1860s, as the War of Northern Aggression (which, ironically, is how Mexicans refer to the Mexican-American War). I was very surprised to discover later in life that most people refer to it as the Civil War. I still cannot see how Sherman's March to Sea, in which General William T. Sherman and his troops raped, pillaged and burned their way through a large swath of the South, could even remotely be referred to as civil, so this terminology has always puzzled me. Perhaps, considering the kind of scorched earth total war Sherman waged, it would have been more fitting to refer to the Civil War as the Civilian War.

The Spanish Civil War doesn't seem very civil either. If you have ever seen Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica, which depicts the 1937 bombing of Gernika by the Nazis, which destroyed the town and left 1,600 people dead, it seems to me you would be very hard put thinking that was civil. The English Civil Wars (there were three of them) killed 10 percent of the population. The War of the Roses is sometimes called a civil war, but frankly I don't think naming a war after a flower is much of an improvement, although I suppose it's marginally better than calling it the War of the Daisies or the War of the Daffodils or the War of the Pansies.

I think calling the War in Iraq a civil war would make even more Americans turn against it. Many young people already don't seem to think about the war much, as New York Times writer Bob Herbert pointed out in a recent column. Evoking a very long and tedious PBS documentary when referring to the war is not likely to make them care more. Perhaps they would be more interested if it was called the Playstation 3 War, although that might easily be confused with the bloodshed caused in our own streets by the battles between shoppers trying to buy the gaming system, which must have made our soldiers in Iraq feel that they were not the only victims of sectarian violence.

Not everyone is jumping on the civil war bandwagon. The Washington Post, is waiting for a White House press release before they take the plunge and declare it a civil war as Dana Priest explains: "We try to avoid the labels, particularly when the elected government itself does not call its situation a civil war." As Michael Stipe once said, responding to rumors that he was gay, "I think labels are for canned food," no doubt referring to the famous canvases of tomato soup cans painted by gay artist Andy Warhol. I'm glad the liberals at The Washington Post don't like labels either.

The White House understandably has been very resistant to referring to the War in Iraq as a civil war. Although Webster's dictionary, which has a well-known liberal bias, defines "civil war" as "a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country," clearly this definition misses the nuances of what really constitutes a civil war. As Tony Snow pointed out, the situation in Iraq doesn't even come close to being a civil war according to those who really know about these sorts of things. "I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who, to use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within Iran [sic]," he explained patiently to the thick-headed members of the press during a recent news conference, apparently getting ahead of himself a little by referring to the upcoming war in Iran instead of Iraq. "At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don't have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no. What you do have is a number of different groups -- you know, they've been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government." I don't think anyone can put it more clearly than that.

I would like to declare a moratorium on referring to any wars as civil wars. It is an oxymoron that should be banished from our language. And as far as the War in Iraq goes, I think we should resist trying to simplify a complicated situation with a glib phrase. Perhaps we need a terminology that reflects just how confusing and difficult the conflict has become. So taking a page from Tony Snow's book I propose calling it the Iraq War of Terrorists and Rejectionists Not Operating as a Unified Force and Without a Clearly Identifiable Leader Who Severally and Together Pose a Threat to the Government Through Sectarian Violence Operations. Or maybe we could just call it the Iraq War for short. Or better yet, perhaps we should pay less attention to the War of Words and more attention to the real war.

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Jon Swift, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Tony Snow, Civil War, NBC, Matt Lauer, Fox News, Washington Post, Bob Herbert, Michael Sripe, Journalism, Politics, Foreign Policy