Tell It Like It Is: Civil War
(which Bushco precipitated)
It is an acknowledgement that has come too late for too many of the soldiers and civilians who have died in Iraq, but some of the mainstream media is finally beginning to call the morass in Iraq what it is: a civil war.
NBC News formally broke ranks Monday from the Bush administration’s effort to frame the war in Iraq as the United States defending a fledgling democratic ally against invading “Islamofascists,” to use Bush’s word. In his blog, NBC News anchor Brian Williams said the decision was made “after much consultation over the weekend with our colleagues, fellow journalists, historians, analysts and members of the military, both present and former.” He wrote that calling it a civil war “is a more accurate reflection of what is happening there.”
NBC is following the Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor, who have both begun calling the conflict between warring factions within Iraq a civil war. The New York Times , meanwhile, ran a news analysis Sunday that said “a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.”
The New York Times itself is being cautious about whether to call this civil war a civil war. The Times ’ Tom Zeller Jr. in his blog quotes an internal memo from Times executive editor Bill Keller that says, “It’s hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war” but adds that the phrase “fails to capture the complexity of what is happening on the ground. The war in Iraq is, in addition to being a civil war, an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, a scene of criminal gangsterism and a cycle of vengeance. We believe ‘civil war’ should not become reductionist shorthand for a war that is colossally complicated.”
As weaselly as that explanation may sound to some, it at least has the ring of an editor making an honest effort to find the right words to accurately depict a conflict that defies the blithe characterizations coming from the White House. The Washington Post's Dana Priest's explanation for why her paper is not calling it a civil war, though, jaw-droppingly confirms that it is too willing to take its editorial cues from administration talking points. "We try to avoid the labels, particularly when the elected government itself does not call its situation a civil war," Priest said on MSNBC, even as she goes on to acknowledge "absolutely the level of violence equals a civil war." So if elected officials, either here or in Baghdad, say that horse manure is chocolate, its readers should accept that the Post would avoid the labels, especially when the elected government does not call it horse manure?
It is true that Iraq is not your great-great-grandfather’s civil war, and that is precisely the door where the Bush administration wants the public and the press to check their brains. President Bush is doggedly refusing to adopt the “civil war moniker” even today. In Estonia, Bush told reporters, “There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented in my opinion because of these attacks by al-Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal.” In that same vein, U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said, "As long as we see the government of Iraq still functioning and we do not see another viable entity out there trying to take control . . . then we have sectarian violence," not civil war.
The administration is sparing no linguistic gymnastics in its efforts to retain enough shreds of political capital to salvage what is increasingly viewed—including by the neoconservatives who got us into this mess in the first place—as a lost cause.
That is clearly why “a senior American intelligence official” told the New York Times for today’s editions that “the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.” The article noted that “the interview occurred at a time of intense debate over whether the United States should enlist Iran’s help in stabilizing Iraq.” Clearly, the administration is pulling out all stops with the media to keep up the drumbeat against troop withdrawal in Iraq and against any constructive engagement with Iran, Syria and the Palestinians. (In case readers might wonder who “this senior American intelligence official” might be, the Times ran a photo on its Web site of CIA director Michael V. Hayden and Defense Intelligence Agency director Gen. Michael D. Maples testifying before a congressional committee.)
The Washington Post, however, does upset the administration’s public narrative with a report based on a classified Marine Corps document that “describes Iraq's Sunni minority as ‘embroiled in a daily fight for survival,’ fearful of ‘pogroms’ by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.” The report appears to confirm what more forthright experts and reporters have been saying for months, if not years—that the presence of U.S. troops in the region has exacerbated foreign influence in Iraq, not the other way around.
TomPaine.com regular contributor Robert Dreyfuss wrote in March that “It is no longer possible to say that there is no civil war in Iraq. It’s here. It has begun.” Back then, he said the point at which the Iraq conflict became a civil war probably happened much earlier, when the number of people killed in sectarian and ethnic clashes exceeded the number of soldiers killed in battles between the U.S. and resistance fighters. The fact that the mainstream media remains reluctant to call it as it sees it this late in the game is a testament to the extent to which the Bush administration has a significant segment of the Fourth Estate cowed. Still, in spite of an unprecedented effort to bully the media into obsequiousness, even at the threat of jail , some reporters are telling the truth—finally.
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