The Daily Background

In response to William Kristol’s stunning declaration today that Iraq is “not in a civil war” (see above video via ThinkProgress), I’ve decided to post a list I compiled late last year back when there was still some controversy about calling Iraq a civil war. Keep in mind that the list would be a lot longer now if I had bothered to maintain it further, but the whole thing is so uncontroversial now and virtually everybody admits it, I never bothered to. So, who thinks that Iraq is in a civil war?

• The White House: Still in denial
• The scholars and experts: Not in denial
• The LA Times: Not in denial
• NYT’s Maureen Dowd: Not in denial
• NBC News: Not in denial
• CNN’s Michael Ware: Not in denial
• The Christian Science Monitor: Not in denial
• UN Secretary General Kofi Annan: “We could be there. In fact, we are almost there.”
• Wash Post’s Dana Priest: “Absolutely” believes the “level of violence [in Iraq] equals a civil war.”
• The Democratic National Committee: “President Bush… should stop splitting hairs and start acknowledging the fact that Iraq is in a civil war”
• McClatchy Newspapers (formerly Knight Ridder): Awfully close to calling it a civil war (”a growing number of Middle East analysts … say that Iraq’s cascading civil war has spun out of Washington’s control.”)
• Associated Press: On the fence (”Editors at The Associated Press have discussed the issue and haven’t reached a definitive stance”)
• ABC, CBS: Discussing (”Officials at both ABC News and CBS News said that they discuss the situation all the time, but that there’s no network policy to use the term civil war”)
• Newsweek Columnist Fareed Zakaria: Not in denial
• The White House, update: Still in denial
• The New York Times jumps on the civil war bandwagon. Good for them.
• President Clinton as well.
• … and former Secretary of State Colin Powell too. (Note that Powell was also Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
• Well-known conservative Washington Post columnist George F. Will has now called the situation in Iraq “semi-genocidal,” seeming to indicate that he believes it is beyond civil war.
• Further, Al Gore has now called the situation in Iraq “worse than a civil war.”
• The Washington Post editorial board referred to the situation in Iraq as an “incipient civil war,” on December 7 2006, hinting that they may soon consider it a straight-out civil war.
• Washington Post Senior military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks (like Dana Priest, he is as close as WaPo reporters get to rock-star status) said on the December 10th episode of NBC’s Meet The Press that he believes the situation in Iraq is “an insurgency, a civil war, it’s, I think the pure hobbesian state- the war of all against all at this point. It-it isn’t a, it’s worse than a civil war in some ways, it’s in a state of meltdown. The country is falling apart.”
• A CNN poll conducted late fall 2006 showed that 65% of Americans consider the situation in Iraq a civil war.
• Republican Senator Gordon Smith (from Oregon) called the situation in Iraq a “civil war” on the CNN program The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on December 11, 2006. The Senator also hinted that he believes the President is in a state of denial about the situation in Iraq but hopes he will change his mind.
• A USA Today/Gallup poll released on December 11 2006 indicated that 76% of the American public believed Iraq was in a civil war, versus only 22% who didn’t.
• Former US-supported interim prime minister Iyad Allawi called the situation a civil war as early as March 2006. He has more recently said that Iraq is “approaching now, unfortunately, very fast the point of no return.”
• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has called the situation in Iraq a ‘civil war‘ now as well.
• Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash (ret.) began calling the situation in Iraq a ‘civil war’ as early as spring 2006
• Joe Biden, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chair has said “We now have a civil war… All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not put Iraq together again, absent Maliki making some very hard decisions about what he’s going to do.”
• Senator Ted Kennedy repeatedly called the situation in Iraq a “civil war” in a January 9, 2006 speech for the National Press Club.
• In an interview with the British Channel 4, now-former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton referred to the situation in Iraq as a “civil war.” Video here (multiformat choice: Quicktime or Windows Media).

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