civil war?

Yesterday NBC made the fairly inevitable decision to begin calling the Iraq situation an official Civil War. Frankly I'm not sure how it has taken this long for someone to make this call. President Bush has remained firm that it's not a civil war, however common sense definitions indicate that it's fairly obvious that the situation collapsed into civil war several thousand deaths ago.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

"A civil war is a war in which parties within the same culture, society or nationality fight for political power or control of an area. Political scientists use two criteria: the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second criteria is that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side."

Fairly obvious?

Tony Snow seemed to think it was fairly obvious that it can't be called a civil war when he spoke to the press yesterday. According to him, a civil war is "where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy in a land." Thanks for clearing that up Tony...obviously you and the President have it right...that's not what's happening in Iraq...

The issue is obviously a lot more complicated. How do you calculate the impact of America's involvement in the situation? I can't help but feel that our sloppy war tactics forced these people into a certain degree of desperation that could lead to a huge increase in violent outcry. I also get a little panicky thinking that there's nowhere to go from here except chaos and although I would love for our troops to come home, how horrible would it be for us to drive them into war with each other and then back out. Let's ask Somalia how that worked out.

I guess in the end all of this "civil war" mumbo jumbo doesn't really make much of a difference. We can continue calling it "sectarian violence" for as long as we like and in the end it's just semantics. People are still killing each other. We are still failing to bring peace. It's still really sad. I wonder how much peace we could bring if we redirected the millions of dollars being spent every day on this war away from military spending and put more of it toward meeting the real needs of the Iraqi's. Millions of dollars. Every day. $6 Billion every month. Do you know how many goats you could buy for World Vision with that money?! LOTS!