DOES the strange and contentious debate over whether to call the debacle in Iraq a civil war really matter?
Surely not to any of the as-yet-undetermined number of Sunni Iraqis dragged off, tortured and murdered by one of the Shia Iraqis' militias. Surely not to any of the ever growing number of Shias who have died in bombings rigged by one or another of the Sunni insurgent factions. Surely, this semantic struggle cannot matter to them any more than it mattered to any of our nearly 3,000 dead soldiers, Marines and airmen, whether they were killed by an "insurgent" or one of soon-to-be-former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "dead-enders."
But if this debate doesn't really count in Baghdad, where does it matter?
The answer, of course, is here. This whole argument is purely for domestic consumption -- and that tells us some instructive things about both the rigid nature of the United States' political divisions and about the way in which people on either side of that divide would like to bend the news to their advantage.
The White House and those who still support the war in Iraq are desperate to prevent the conflict from being described as a civil war because they understand that certain conclusions are likely to follow from that classification. Perhaps foremost among them is a belief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his tyranny set in motion a chain of events that have made things worse for the Iraqi people and their country's situation more dangerous for everybody else in the world -- including the United States. On the other side of the divide are those whose opposition to the war is rooted in a reflexive hostility toward George W. Bush. To them, the term "civil war" is useful not because it accurately describes the tragedy in Iraq, but because -- in their view -- it brings the president one step closer to complete humiliation.
Both sides demand that U.S. news organizations adopt their political nomenclature, no matter what the reporters on the ground and their editors acting in good faith believe they are witnessing.
