The Luxury of Distance

If you’re a member of the news-reading community, it’s a safe bet you’ve come to realize the full horror of the administration’s Iraqi adventure. The daily diet of car bombs, the dead, and the endless destruction cannot have slipped your attention. Sure, the news might come neatly packaged in the phrase “sectarian slaughter,” but it’s hard to read the death count day after day without feeling something more significant is taking place.

The nation’s top news organizations have battled the same emotions of late, with many of them vexed about how to cope with terminology about the war. It’s an issue consistently debated since 2003, as the administration and compliant news agencies had worked together to shape the country’s various perceptions of the conflict. This past week, in the wake of a decisive electoral defeat and the removal of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, the beleaguered president took another blow as a few major news organizations began to shift their description of the conflict to “civil war.”

In a showing of the semantic significance, NBC’s Matt Lauer actually made an official announcement on the network’s “Today” show about the company’s decision to utilize the term “civil war.” Lauer said, “After careful consideration, NBC News has decided that a change in terminology is warranted, that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as civil war.” The network’s cable news channel followed suit.

Needless to say, NBC is by no means the first outlet to alter their official nomenclature. According to Editor & Publisher writer, Anna Crane, the Los Angeles Times was amongst the first media outlets to shed the qualifiers and label the fighting directly as a civil war. Other organizations have since fallen into line. The Christian Science Monitor likes “deepening civil war,” while Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is pretty direct: “We’re in the middle of a civil war and are being shot at by both sides.”

Virtually all of this debate on the correct appellation actually centers on finding a definition that aptly describes the situation on the ground. So no matter what the word choice, every editorial board in the country has at some stage considered where they will fall on the question of meaning. And predictably, those editors interviewed by The Washington Post who still avoid using the term “civil war,” most cited definition as their defense.

Still, when looking for a description of events, it’s hard to go past CNN’s Baghdad reporter Michael Ware’s description. Ware reported to Paula Zahn Now last week, “By any academic’s definition, this is civil war, organized conflict by two elements within a country to pursue the political center, with elements of ethnic cleansing, militia combat, family against family, neighbor against neighbor, with a degree of organization and coordination.”

Academics are indeed inclined to agree with Ware, according to Edward Wong’s Nov. 26 news analysis in The New York Times, “A Matter of Definition: What Makes a Civil War, and Who Declares It So?” Wong reports that most American scholars of civil war are in agreement with James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford, who says, “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.”

Apparently then, Tony Snow, the White House, and the leadership of Iraq all fall outside the definition of “reasonable person.” And when Snow dealt with the question of terminology at the Oct. 20 White House press briefing, his defense against Fearon’s claim was less than persuasive: “I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.”

Snow continued, “At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.”

That’s pretty unconvincing, to put it bluntly, much more so in the face of overwhelming agreement amongst the country’s civil war academics and a handfull of its perceptive foreign correspondents. Even so, the majority of news organizations, as catalogued by Think Progress, continue to toe the line and opt for cutesy alliterative terms like “snowballing sectarian violence,” courtesy of Fox News, or “sectarian slaughter,” of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Somewhere, behind all the bluster, lays the real reason for this purposeless debate. It’s not about academic definitions or historical precedents; ultimately, it’s about preserving American sensibilities. By accepting a change in terminology, news organizations accept not only the failure of the U.S. invasion, but also the unsettling responsibilities and blame associated with that failure. Evidently, that’s too raw for editorial boards of major media outlets, and so they seek solace in the safety of semantics.

But don’t be fooled; ordinary Iraqis aren’t strolling through the bazaar this morning, discussing the semantic differences in our newspapers. For them, the carnage is immediate; the horrible failure of the invasion permeates every aspect of their daily existence. And for the American media to continue negating the Iraqi reality on the dubiously thin grounds of definition, belies the truth and our role in creating it.



Bede A. Moore ’06-’07 is a history concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.