Back in the early summer and spring, Darfur was our semantic battle of choice. I mean this: As mass killings, government-sponsored militia rampages and displacement continued there unabated, we skirmished here whether Darfur was really a genocide.
If it was, well, then, we would be obliged to do something about it and would follow through; if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t. Needless to say, the yes-it’s-a-genocide and no-it’s-not camps did not divide along lines of pure linguistic interpretation.
They divided politically, along an ideological fissure between humanitarian interventionists and realists, and not a single member of either camp was likely to switch sides based on an academic reconsideration of what the word genocide really means.
And yet those who cared passionately about the suffering in Darfur held out hope that, if only people would come to see the situation as an “official” genocide, they would suddenly remember the appeals of the Geneva Conventions and of the human heart and come to the Darfuris’ aid.
They didn’t. A single word does not have as much power to induce political action as we think it does, and categories of strife and suffering are not so neat as to allow different words to trigger specific different international responses, like an automated telephone hotline. (“Did you say ‘genocide’? All right! Your 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers are on the way.”)
And yet we are now embroiled in the exact same kind of controversy: Is Iraq, or is it not, officially in a state of “civil war”? Last week, news organizations began switching away from vaguer terms like “sectarian conflict,” beginning with NBC’s flashy announcement on Monday’s “Today Show” that it had, after much consideration, determined that the situation in Iraq was a real “civil war.”
The choice was a big deal, prompting news stories on the decision and a peeved reaction from the White House, which emphatically rejects the term “civil war,” preferring, as Bush put it on Tuesday, “attacks by al-Qaida causing people to seek reprisal.” But this debate is hardly new. It was roiling last spring, too; only a little overshadowed by the Darfur/”genocide” question.
Why is what we call Iraq such a big deal? “It’s a political debate, not a semantic debate or a theoretical debate,” political guru David Gergen told the Christian Science Monitor last Thursday:
“In politics, the conventional wisdom has held for some time that if the public concludes our soldiers were in the middle of a civil war, they would think it hopeless and want to withdraw quickly.”
In other words, “civil war” has functioned for us, in the Iraq debate, just like “genocide” in the Darfur one: As a perceived trigger that, once it is pulled, will set off a chain reaction of decisions leading to our quick exit from the country. We can keep fighting in a nation embroiled in profound sectarian conflict, butnot one in a state of civil war.
Except, like in Darfur, the word hasn’t worked the way it was supposed to. We’ve started using it, but policymakers and commentators are still considering the option of a short-term upsurge in troop levels, and even most Democrats aren’t gunning for immediate withdrawal.
In retrospect — and now, and into the future, as we continue to debate what a civil war is and whether Iraq fits the bill (is there an international body that bestows certification on civil wars, like the World Martial Arts College certifies black belts?) — such discussions seem not only to be a waste of time, but also dangerous.
They’ve allowed us to hide from facing how things have gone the opposite of how we wanted them to, and put off making hard decisions by pretending our decision hinges on two magic words.
I invite you to stop officially caring whether Iraq is a civil war or not, and join me in believing that the facts on the ground in Baghdad — terrible enough to warrant a drastic change in military strategy — stay the same no matter what we call them.
Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
