I noted over the weekend that the Los Angeles Times broke new media ground with regards to covering the war in Iraq: the paper decided to stop playing semantics games and call the conflict a “[tag]civil war[/tag].”
Today, NBC did the same thing. From this morning’s MSNBC broadcast:
“The news from Iraq is becoming grimmer every day. Over the long holiday weekend bombings killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood in [tag]Baghdad[/tag]. And six Sunni men were doused with kerosene and burned alive. Shiite muslims are the majority, but Sunnis like Saddam Hussein ruled that country until the war.
Now, the battle between Shiites and Sunnis has created a civil war in Iraq. Beginning this morning, MSNBC will refer to the fighting in Iraq as a civil war — a phrase the White House continues to resist. But after careful thought, MSNBC and NBC News decided over the weekend, the terminology is appropriate, as armed militarized factions fight for their own political agendas. We’ll have a lot more on the situation in [tag]Iraq[/tag] and the decision to use the phrase, civil war.”
The NYT noted over the weekend that Bush administration officials continue to remind reporters that they don’t “believe” it’s a civil war, but at this point, does anyone still care what the people who create their own reality believe or not?
The administration has to resist the “civil war” label, of course, because of the political implications — Americans have already soured on the war, but those numbers can and will drop even further if the nation believes we have 140,000 troops in the middle of a civil war. With this in mind, the Bush gang is left, once again, to deny the reality that the rest of us have already seen.
With regards to the definition, the NYT had a fairly helpful piece on the subject yesterday.
The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.
American professors who specialize in the study of civil wars say that most of their number are in agreement that Iraq’s conflict is a civil war.
“I think that at this time, and for some time now, the level of violence in Iraq meets the definition of civil war that any reasonable person would have,” said James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford.
While the term is broad enough to include many kinds of conflicts, one of the sides in a civil war is almost always a sovereign government. So some scholars now say civil war began when the Americans transferred sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government in June 2004. That officially transformed the anti-American war into one of insurgent groups seeking to regain power for disenfranchised Sunni Arabs against an Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and increasingly dominated by Shiites.
Others say the civil war began this year, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a chain of revenge killings that left hundreds dead over five days and has yet to end. Mr. Allawi proclaimed a month after that bombing that Iraq was mired in a civil war. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,” he said.
In other words, it’s been a civil war for quite a while now, and the domestic media is finally catching up.
It’s hard to say for certain, but isn’t it possible that the media was willing to be bullied on this point for the past couple of years, but that the lame-duck president isn’t quite as intimidating to the press corps anymore?
Update: Via Dan Froomkin, Harvard professor Monica Toft wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org in July that there are six criteria for considering a conflict a civil war — and that Iraq had met all six since early 2004.