Okay Okay, It's a Civil War (Sandbox in Iraq)

The media is finally referring to the Iraq conflict as a ‘civil war.’ It shouldn’t have taken so long.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Updated: 1:58 p.m. CT Nov 28, 2006

Nov. 28, 2006 - To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Now we are engaged in a great—or at least major—civil war, testing whether this nation (of Iraq), or any nation (in the Middle East), can long endure. On Monday, NBC News announced that “after careful consideration,” it decided that “the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as a civil war.” The Los Angeles Times made the same decision, and within a few days most of the mainstream news media (with the exception, no doubt, of Fox News) will likely follow suit.

Why did it take so long for the media to use the term civil war? The answer says a lot about the relationship between the press and the presidency in the early years of the 21st century.

The first thing to understand is that the English language has no generally accepted definition of a civil war. On one side are experts who say that as soon as the Coalition Provisional Authority turned over sovereignty to the new Iraqi government in 2004 amid a sustained insurgency, a state of civil war existed. At the other extreme is the renowned British military strategist John Keegan, who believes that only a domestic conflict in which two sides wear different uniforms can be called a civil war. In between sit the rest of us, roughly figuring that fierce factional fighting meets the test. As the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, we know it when we see it.

Reasonable people can differ on when Iraq crossed the line, but it was clearly many months ago, when rival ethnic and sectarian groups drove the death toll skyward. The Americans have lost nearly 3,000 soldiers, with more than 20,000 wounded so far, and we have gotten off lightly by comparison to the people of Iraq. Estimates of the number of Iraqi deaths start at more than 50,000 and extend into the hundreds of thousands.

So why the reluctance to call this a civil war? No one hesitated to do so in Lebanon in the 1980s, when fighting broke out between religious factions. The difference this time is that the phrase has now been heavily politicized and President Bush is dead-set against it entering coverage of the war. “I hear people say, ‘Well, civil war this, civil war that,’” he said in August in that belittling tone he favors. “The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box and a unity government is working to respond to the will of the people.” The idea that elections and civil wars are not mutually exclusive did not seem to penetrate.

Even on Monday, after NBC News announced its decision, the White House immediately issued a statement critical of the term. In October, White House spokesman Tony Snow said Iraq was not in a civil war because the “different forces” are not “unified.” Yesterday the line was that because most of the fighting is in the Baghdad area, the country as a whole is not in a civil war. Someone forgot to tell Snow that the American Civil War—the standard by which he measures Iraq—started out with battles near our capital city, Washington, D.C. Even by the end, the war had not spread to New York, Boston, Chicago and most other major cities.

The reason the Bush administration doesn’t want this called a civil war isn’t hard to figure. Once that threshold is crossed, support for American involvement will fall further, as Americans ask why their sons and daughters should be killed and maimed as part of some other country’s family feud. The Bush argument that Iraq is the “central front in the war on terror” rings hollow when the “enemy” has become a bunch of Iraqi tribes that hate each other.

But why has the news media gone along with this fiction for so many months? Because beginning after 9/11, the White House had news organizations on the defensive. “Be careful what you say,” then-press secretary Ari Fleischer intoned. Vice President Dick Cheney, who never faced combat, called reporters "lazy" for not reporting more positive news out of Iraq. As recently as this past summer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was still comparing opponents of the war to “appeasers.”

It wasn’t too much of a leap to figure that such a characterization could also refer to media outlets careless enough to use a term for the war that the government disliked. With the midterm election returns, we’ve forgotten how recently the White House held a hammer over the head of anyone who might dare dissent. Earlier this year, any major news organization deciding to call Iraq a civil war would have almost certainly been attacked as unpatriotic by the White House-RNC-Fox industrial complex. Even now, using the phrase in defiance of the White House will be viewed in some quarters as a political act rather than reporting the self-evident truth.

Once upon a time, the press didn’t much care if the president disliked its descriptions of a war. In the early 1960s, long before the Vietnam War reached its climax, the conflict there was depicted as a “quagmire.” (JFK was furious at David Halberstam of The New York Times for not reporting more positively). To the annoyance of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, it was also routinely described as a “civil war in the South.”

But that was before the commoditization of news. It was before offending an administration (and thus the readers and viewers who backed it) inspired fear of lower circulation and ratings. In those years, Washington had other weapons with which to intimidate the media, particularly the issuance of broadcast licenses, but the power of the popular president to harm a news organization in the marketplace was not as great as it is today.

The famous 19th century cartoon character, “Mr. Dooley,” liked to say that the Supreme Court followed “the illiction returns” (sic). The same is now true of the national news media, which never wants to risk getting too far out in front of public opinion, even when the facts on the ground warrant it. Imagine if the GOP had retained control of the House and the Senate: You can bet that "civil war" would still be verboten. Instead, with the verdict of the voters fully registered, the media is finally free to use plain English to cover the Iraqi civil war without looking like appeasers. It shouldn’t have taken this long.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15937798/site/newsweek/