Civil War in Iraq

So the new debate about Iraq (new a relative term of course) seems to be whether or not the "country" is in a state of Civil War. The Bush Administration desperately wants for the conflict not to be characterized in this way, suspecting that the terminology could cause further political fallout and erode support for the war even more than has been done so far. Democrats looking for a way to pull out want to use the term for exactly the same reason - thinking that it will give support for the argument that it is no longer our conflict. Meanwhile, news organizations seem to be trying to give themselves a harder image by "telling it like it is."

My problem is that to me - it's not a civil war, it's far far worse. Here's an apt description of the conflict by CNN's Michael Ware (as quoted by Washington Post's Dan Froomkin):

"I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don't want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn't one."

Only the situation Mr. Ware is describing isn't Civil War at all. Civil War, as horrific as it can be, implies some kind of organized insurrection from an established government. This isn't civil war it's anarchy. It's the complete absence of the rule of law, replaced by the law of the sword (or in this case the AK-47). It's gang violence on a national scale.

I guess what my point is that debating semantics is useless. Whether we call it a Civil War or not doesn't change the fact that if we (or preferably the whole international community) don't stop the extremists from killing every last moderate left, there will be no Iraqi nation, in fact there won't be even a Sunni nation fighting a Shia nation, there will only be neighbors brutally murdering their neighbors - chaos and the end to any semblance of civilization.

Forget words, forget religion, forget politics. We fucked up big time by causing this - we can't pretend we're not involved, but neither can we say we've fixed it or that it hasn't gotten worse. It's not about Democrat or Republican, or Christian or Muslim, or who did what when. It's about the people who just want their kids to go to school, who just want to work and laugh and live getting the shit kicked out of them and even if the level of violence it's reached hadn't been our fault, we would still have a responsibility as a witness to stop it from happening.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. -- John Donne