The "Civil War" Taboo

The inability to form blanket hypotheses on the causes of "civil wars" or uniform solutions to conflicts tagged with this distinction calls into question the efficacy of a term laden more with political baggage than analytical utility. The debate over "civil war" in the most apparent conflict today, Iraq, is not presented as a matter of finding a cause or solution, but instead, the term is deployed as a political weapon in the wider debate over Iraq. This rose to the surface in late 2006, with an ironic explosion of media coverage over the media itself when NBC announced that it would, against the orders of the Bush administration, begin using the term "civil war" in its stories covering Iraq. It was soon followed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other predominantly liberal news media corporations making similar announcements. Instead of becoming an argument over descriptive accuracy, the move was widely accepted as move against the Bush administration intended to shore up public opposition to the war. Why should the American public support its soldiers and tax dollars being wasted on the internal conflict of another country? As James Steinberg, dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas wrote, “If Iraq is a democracy struggling against insurgents and you describe it that way, people might still support you. If it is a civil war, it is indisputably the case that Americans will say, 'What are we doing in the middle of a civil war?” Even those who support the move can’t deny its political motivation. Nothing happened in November of 2006 to prompt a sudden collapse of Iraq into civil war. The symbolic nature of the ordeal was clear as Matt Lauer broke from news coverage on the Today show not to announce a certain deterioration in the Iraq conflict, but NBC’s new formal policy of using the term “civil war.”

The term “civil war” now has less analytical use than political use. The New York Times made this apparent when they pledged not to overuse the term for “dramatic effect” noting that the conflict also contained elements of “an insurgency, an occupation, a battle against terrorism and a scene of criminal gangsterism.” These clearly informal terms illustrate the general preference for media exceptionalism over any alignment with military strategy or international relations theory. Even more striking is that the pentagon was the first to use the tool for similarly political purposes; with General John Abizaid threatening that Iraq may “collapse into civil war” if more troop deployments weren’t authorized. Passed using the same rhetoric for a political purpose, the General’s comments indicate his assumption that the civil war is something that can be identified, avoided and cured. Even the man who at the time was the highest ranking US commander in the Middle East assumed a general category of civil war. This generalization avoids any analysis of the specific causes of what may or may not be rightfully determined a civil war in Iraq, and thus negates any possibility for considering the most correct solution. This term, loaded with hundreds of years of political and historical symbolism, is an example of political rhetoric crowding out analytical efficiency.