Critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies have been obsessed for more than a year with an odd effort to designate the struggle as a “civil war.” This week, NBC News as a matter of policy agreed to call the conflict a “civil war,” while UN Secretary General Kofi Anan and even former Secretary of State Colin Powell also suggested that this might be an appropriate description for the current state of the struggle. Anti-war forces are jubilant over their apparent rhetorical victory, but offer no explanation whatever as to why it’s important. Even if the whole world embraces the “civil war” phrase, why is that significant in any way for shaping future policy?

Obviously, anti-war forces would maintain that once we acknowledge that a civil war is raging on the ground, it becomes clear and inescapable that we have no role to play and we’ll be forced to pull our troops far away from the warring combatants.

But where has it ever been established that the U.S. can’t get involved in “civil wars”?

In Afghanistan in 2001, we entered a long running civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance and helped the good guys to decisive victory within a matter of weeks. No one looked at the situation and said, “Uh-oh, there’s a bloody civil war that’s been going on in that country for years, so the U.S. can’t possibly send its forces!” As a matter of fact, there’s another “civil war” raging in Afghanistan right now –-- a conflict that fits the classic “civil war” model far better than the situation in Iraq. In Afghanistan, there are two clearly recognizable sides (the Taliban and the Karzai government) warring for control. In Iraq, there’s no organized, recognizable, anti-government leadership of the insurgency, no program or even ruling clique that the terrorists seek to impose, no prominent leaders with whom the U.S. and our allies can negotiate or around whom the opposition can rally. The real struggle is governmental authority vs. bloody chaos—and the fact that bloody chaos is winning at the moment doesn’t mean that it’s a civil war.

In any event, the fact that Afghanistan does face a continuing civil war (unequivocally) doesn’t mean that the NATO countries (with 26 of our allies gallantly providing forces, some of them expert and significant) feel the need to pull out and disentangle themselves from the conflict.

In Bosnia and Kosovo the United States (under President Clinton) also inserted itself into the midst of horrible civil wars and, in both cases managed to reduce the nightmarish killing which, in its genocidal horror, far exceeded even the current misery of Iraq. During the 1980’s America also took sides in civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, eventually helping to establish functioning democracies in both Central American nations. Going further back in history, the Spanish American War of 1898 represented U.S. insertion into a Cuban civil war; our much less successful 11-year involvement in Vietnam also initially aligned us with one side in a civil war in South Vietnam (with the government forces verses the Viet Cong) before the North Vietnamese openly invaded.

One of the first major triumphs of the Cold War saw the U.S. and Britain helping the Greeks fight off a Communist insurgency in the Greek Civil War (that claimed some 100,000 lives in 1946-49). Going back to the Wilson and Harding administrations, we also sent a major expeditionary force to fight alongside the “White” forces in the spectacularly deadly Russian Civil War (with literally millions of casualties) that followed the Bolshevik Revolution (my father’s five sisters – who he never met – all died as civilian victims of that conflict).

Moreover, our unwillingness to take decisive action to stop genocide and senseless bloodshed in Rwanda, the Congo and Sudan/Darfur may register in histories of the era as some of this nation’s most significant moral failures.

This history is worth reciting only to defeat the idiotic leftist assumption that if Iraq gets classified by everyone as a civil war (a bogus classification, but one that’s gaining ground) then it means that the argument is over – we most get out.

Why? Since when? Who says?

Given our long, long record of involvement with properly designated “civil wars” (with some of those interventions major triumphs, others embarrassing setbacks) the idea that we can’t ever, under any circumstances, intrude ourselves into such conflicts in ludicrous.

No, I don’t think “civil war” is the right term for the chaotic, multi-faceted struggle in Iraq. If anti-war commentators want to say it’s become a sectarian conflict, Shiites vs. Sunnis, then which side does the government and its coalition supporters represent. Is Moqtada al Sadr (Shiite leader) on the side of the government (in which he’s represented) and its coalition partners or should he be classified as one of the insurgents? The inability to give any clear answer to that question demonstrates the difficult and inappropriate nature of the inane effort to squeeze and distort the Iraq situation to fit the paradigm of civil war.

And even if you succeed in forcing this unique and tragic war into that classic label, you’re still left with one huge, unanswerable, inescapable two word question---

SO WHAT?