On Monday morning, America woke up to Matt Lauer announcing on "The Today Show" that NBC would now start referring to the situation in Iraq as a civil war. NBC News is the first major television news organization to start calling Iraq a civil war and joins the Los Angeles Times as the only two prominent media outlets using the terminology.
This decision has set off a flurry of debate over the situation in Iraq and just what people should call the war. Is Iraq truly engaged in a civil war, as NBC now claims, or is the country just suffering from what President Bush deems "sectarian reprisals"?
NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams wrote on his blog that the decision came after "much consultation over the weekend with our colleagues, fellow journalists, historians, analysts and members of the military, both present and former." NBC News Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss defended the decision, saying, "If you define a civil war as a country where a lot of groups are struggling for power, and that's primarily the struggle, Iraq is in a civil war." Even U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has admitted that Iraq is close to civil war.
But some personalities affiliated with NBC are blasting the decision. Radio host Don Imus, whose popular show, "Imus in the Morning," gets television airplay on the NBC-owned cable news network MSNBC, said, "Do these nitwits at NBC News think this is going to have the impact of when Walter Cronkite came back in Vietnam and said we can't win, and Lyndon Johnson famously said 'Well if we've lost Walter Cronkite, we've lost the country'?"
Is the nomenclature of civil war even important, or is it merely a debate over semantics? The situation in Iraq will remain bleak no matter what the news outlets are calling it. The dangers faced by American soldiers and Iraqi security personnel won't be alleviated by the name change. The death toll of Iraqi civilians won't spike or dip because of what term Brian Williams uses to describe the violence in Iraq.
Yet the decision is still important because of the effect it could have on public opinion. Other news organizations could face pressure from their audiences to follow NBC's lead. If the media starts referring to Iraq as a civil war, it will likely further undermine support for an already unpopular war.
On Thursday, President George W. Bush reiterated that Iraq is not in a civil war and that American troops will not leave until the country is secure. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley agreed with his boss, saying, "The Iraqis don't talk of it as a civil war. The unity government doesn't talk of it as a civil war."
Fantastic. "The unity government doesn't talk of it as a civil war." This is the same unity government that holds next to no power in its own country and manages to survive only by the grace of U.S. military protection. The same unity government that can't stop hundreds of Iraqis from being killed each week by sectarian fighting. The same unity government that is powerless to prevent innocent Iraqis from torture or death simply because they are Shi'a or Sunni. We're supposed to care about what this unity government thinks?
Iraq is in a civil war. Whether NBC's decision will be equivalent to Cronkite saying the United States could not win in Vietnam is uncertain. But Lauer, Williams and the rest of NBC's news executives are right. When religious groups in the same country are openly fighting in the streets, killing people simply because they are different, to call it anything but a civil war would be a denial of the truth.
Benjamin van der Horst is a College sophomore from Cincinnati. He is executive director of the nonpartisan political organization CSAmerica and the managing editor of the Emory Political Review.
This ran on 12/1/06.
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