Why is President Bush refusing to call the situation in Iraq a civil war?

Question

I read he called it a sectrarian war. How does that differ from a civil war?

Answer 1

Contrary to what has been slung about by agenda driven answerers, there are actually two very logical and good reasons why the American government and military (not just President Bush) have refused to label the current sectarian violence in Iraq as a civil war. These are:

1) Less importantly, the current conflict does not fit the definition of a civil war since the insurgents are not an organized legal military force operating under the direction of a disloyal governing body. Rather they are a cobbled group of well trained light and explosive ordinance forces operating under the direction of both foreign and domestic terrorist directors. Many of the insurgents themselves are not actually from Iraq but rather nearby saudi, iran, and syria.

2) More importantly, if the designation of the conflict in Iraq is changed to civil war, the Army will have to withdraw it's troops from security patrols back to it's bases. Only military "advisors" will be allowed on the ground and the Air Force will go to work with increased strategic bombing. In other words, if the government were to dictate that Iraq is in a state of official civil war then the forces which currently provide almost all security in Iraq will be forced to stop patrolling and thereby will decrease the already fragile security in areas of Iraq which are currently protected by American troops. In other words, while the media can feel free to call it whatever they feel like in order to sell a few more ad spaces, the government has to be more responsible with the way they label conflicts

EDIT: Thank you, proudliberal, for all that. I'm sure the notes being passed down from the Air Force Command to the AETC Schools must be innacurate. Er, hardly...

Answer 2

Oh the same old answers. Yes, Obama is president now, but they never criticised Bush back then, did they? In fact, everyone knew it was a lie, and yet he had some of his highest support for invading Iraq. Phoenix even says that Bush did not lie about Iraq because they found bio-weapons labs, well, duh, the US had been monitoring these labs since the first gulf war had ended, Hans Blix was going into these places to make sure they were not in use, and they were, er, not in use. Having labs does not mean they were being used. As for finding mustard and serin gas, they obviously did not find enough for it to be considered a danger to Israel, as the record says that no WMDs were ever found, or even ever existed in Iraq at the time. Near claims this is being misinformed. If setting up your intelligence agency to deliberatly "misinform" you about a certain situation and tell you what you want to hear is not lying, then i think i'm onto a winner here. The problem here is that right wingers want to believe what they want to hear. They only get their information from certain sources, the right wing press, so they are not technically lying here, they are just playing ignorant by ignoring all of the relevant information available. I guess that is what they call irony.

Answer 3

President Bush refuses to call the Iraq situation what it really is because admitting the truth would mean admitting that HE'S single handedly responsible for this mess. What the war in Iraq really is is called ' ethnic cleansing' or worse, GENOCIDE.
The bottom line is this, a war between the people of any given country in which its people are battling against each other is a civil war. Think when the North battled the South here in the States.

Answer 4

Err; Prometheus, being an Air force officer doesn't qualify you as a source. Besides which; the more highly qualified General Powell disagrees with you.

Bush et al don't want to classify Iraq as Civil War because they know the War's only remaining supporters are really big on perceived imagery. Once they lose these last few disaster-deniers, the jig will be up and they won't have any more excuses to keep sucking the American taxpayers dry for a war that is obviously unwinnable.

Answer 5

That's because he is afraid he'll lose more support. The only support he has is from right wing Republicans, some big corporations and the other likes.

If he admits civil war in Iraq, he will lose support for sure. He is very vulnerable.

Answer 6

Because he is unable to admit when he is wrong, and he is unwilling to listen to anyone who tries to tell him differently. Whatever the man wants to call it, it's horrifying. The definition of civil war fits that situation like a glove. Even members of his own party are calling him out on this. The next two years of his Presidency scare the crap out of me. He's proven himself to be incompetent, overly-egotistical, and unable to deal with a situation he created out of stubbornness and blood lust. If only he had put this much effort into going after the terrorists instead of invading Iraq. Now he has no choice, the terrorists flooded into Iraq thanks to the US blowing it wide open. Self-fulfilling prophecy? He had to admit that Hussein had no connection to 9/11, but now he can say truthfully that terrorism is rampant in Iraq. I only wish he could own up to the fact that it's now true because we made it so. He is a dangerous man, our President. It's clear he will wait for another outrageous crisis before even attempting to change the course in Iraq. I just hope that crisis doesn't take place on our own soil.

Answer 7

Bush likes to change the wording on a lot of things.

stay the course now has a different wording. means the same, just different wording.

when the word outsourcing was being used and it had a negative sound to it, he used different wording.

on a recent report about the hungry in America, he change the wording to food insecure or something like that.

doesn't matter what he wants to call things,
a rose by any other name is still a rose......

Answer 8

The war was started so that Haliburton and his campaign contributors can make loads of cash from military contracts. That and the oil companies need to make their money before easy oil runs out too, so assuming he can spell "Civil War", he's not going to upset his contributors' plans the least bit.

Answer 9

He doesn't want to own up to the responsibility that he is the cause of the "civil war" so he calls it a sectarian war that way he doesn't have to admit defeat.

Answer 10

because it is.. it's a war against the religions