The war in Iraq will now be called a civil war in the pages of The Bee.
In case you missed it, the paper made the transition last Monday, as did the Washington bureau of McClatchy Newspapers, The Bee’s parent company.
The Washington bureau oversees coverage of McClatchy reporters in Iraq.
In making the change, the paper joins NBC News, which also adopted the label last week.
The network’s Matt Lauer explained the change on the “Today” show, triggering a wave of ruminating and twittering online, in print and on radio and television among analysts, academics, pundits, talk show hosts and the like as they weighed the possible political implications.
Without fanfare, the Los Angeles Times has been calling it a civil war since October and the Christian Science Monitor began using the term last week as well.
The New York Times said it too would refer to the conflict as civil war when its reporters and their editors “believe it is appropriate,” The Times’ executive editor Bill Keller said in a statement.
Keller said, “We expect to use the phrase sparingly and carefully, not to the exclusion of other formulations, not for dramatic effect.
“The main shortcoming of ‘civil war’ is that, like other labels, it fails to capture the complexity of what is happening on the ground. The war in Iraq is, in addition to being a civil war, an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, a scene of criminal gangsterism and a cycle of vengeance. We believe ‘civil war’ should not become reductionist shorthand for a war that is colossally complicated.”
The White House has steadfastly argued the conflict is not a civil war, which has caused the mainstream news media to refrain from using the term.
President Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, reiterated the administration’s stance last week, saying, “What you have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences, and also trying to destabilize a democracy, which is different than a civil war, where two sides are clashing for territory and supremacy.”
Even now, there is not a media linguistic stampede to call what is happening in Iraq a civil war.
For many months, The Bee’s stories have used phrases like “verging on civil war” and “approaching civil war” and “civil strife” to describe the violence.
Others have been quoted as calling the violence a civil war.
But the recent surge in killing between Shiites and Sunnis as they fight neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad targeting each other’s territory and cleansing their own areas has tipped the scales.
The Bee’s national editor Mark Melnicoe said stories last weekend by McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam describing the district by district violence in great detail caused him and other editors to re-evaluate the situation.
“I’ve been talking about a low-level civil war for more than a year and we’ve run stories that characterized it as a civil war, but mostly we’ve tiptoed around it,” Melnicoe said. “I think there has been a general reluctance to call it a civil war, a natural hesitancy to get out in front of the Bush administration … but in recent months, it’s become increasingly obvious that it is a civil war.”
Melnicoe said he contacted McClatchy’s Washington bureau last Monday about making the change. Mark Seibel, the bureau’s managing editor for international coverage, said the bureau was making the change too, citing Allam’s story as the final push needed.
“It was time to call it a civil war, but we were low-key about it,” Seibel said.
He said comments made by Army Gen. John Abizaid, the military’s top commander in Iraq, to a U.S. Senate panel last summer about sectarian strife being so strong that a civil war was a possibility heightened his sensitivity.
“People know what a civil war is. We’ve seen it in Bosnia, the Congo and in Central America,” Seibel said. “We can parse it a million ways, but in the end, people look at it” and see it’s a civil war.
There was some discussion at The Bee about whether to write an editor’s note telling readers about the change.
In the end, the paper on Tuesday inserted a few paragraphs in the middle of an Iraq war story explaining the reason for the change and also noting NBC’s decision and Matt Lauer’s explanation as well as the White House’s continuing opposition to the label.
For good measure, the headline with the jump of the story said, “Iraq: Sectarian conflict now labeled a civil war.”
In talking to editors at a Page 1 meeting Monday afternoon about whether a separate explanation was necessary, managing editor Joyce Terhaar argued that the war has been going on for so long and that coverage has been so extensive, including the worsening violence, that a change in semantics would be viewed as incremental and not a big deal.
Indeed, said Terhaar, the paper in the evolution of its coverage had described the war in so many ways similar to flat out saying it was a civil war.
Many readers, she said, wouldn’t even notice.
So far she is right.
As of this writing, not a single reader has contacted me about the change.
What that means, I don’t know. What do you think it means?
