It must be the power of television. Few people made a fuss when the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times used the term "civil war" to describe the carnage in Iraq. But when NBC News decided to do the same, this was a big deal.
The Bush administration is wary of the term as the US public, quite understandably, does not like to see its soldiers stuck playing piggy in the middle in someone else's internecine bloodletting.
The administration will know that when the avuncular Walter Cronkite of CBS News - "the most trusted man in America" - declared that it was time to leave Vietnam, the gig was up. If the media, wholesale, start to use the term civil war, America may not be far off that Cronkite moment.
Rob, at Say Anything, shares the White House's misgivings, and fires off a blunderbuss at the US media as a whole.
"This has nothing to do with finding the terminology to accurately portray what's going on in Iraq and everything to do with the media's unending mission to a) make Iraq look like a failure, b) undermine public support for the war and c) force an immediate withdrawal."
James Joyner, at Outside the Beltway, agrees with the military historian John Keegan that Iraq is not in civil war as, in addition to violence and primarily domestic participants, such conflicts have a third defining element: combatants must be trying either to seize national power or to maintain it.
While describing the argument as largely semantic, Mr Joyner writes:
"Whether we call it 'civil war' or 'chaos', it remains a bloody mess and perhaps an intractable one. It is important, though, because it focuses attention on a rather critical fact: In a civil war, the winner governs. That was the case in the English, American, Russian and Spanish Civil Wars. In Iraq, however, there is no shadow government waiting to take over the reins of power."
Media Matters points out that the argument over "civil war" also exists within networks, and carries a revealing piece about CNN. The channnel's international correspondent Michael Ware, reporting in Baghdad, is in no doubt that there is civil war, but not all his colleagues share his view.
Brian Whitaker argued in the Guardian's Comment is Free yesterday that the issue is more than just semantics. "Being honest about the nature of the conflict helps us to see its true nature more clearly - and possibly to have a better idea of what might be done about it," he wrote.
Leave it to Jon Stewart, the satirist, to see the less serious side of this debate.
.jpg?w=600)
