Mainstream media have talked for some time now about the sectarian violence in Iraq verging on civil war. What measures are used to decide when an internal struggle becomes a civil war - length of conflict, death toll, number of fighters, geographic spread, number or severity of weapons? And what of the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, and now Hizbullah in Lebanon?
The definition of war in the Cambridge advanced learner's dictionary is, "armed fighting between two or more countries or groups". By this seemingly simple definition, both Iraq and Israel should be at war.
So why the reluctance by the media to utter the word in these situations? And why the comparative ease of use of terms coined by politicians, or their speechwriters, such as "war on terror" or "war on drugs"?
