Of course, Krauthammer never can resist pompusly mocking those he disagrees with.

To my surprise, this seems to be a term (like “liberal” or “conservative”) that is so relative to the user as to be pretty meaningless to define anything in descriptive writing.

In the broadest possible sense, people use it to mean “battles among fellow citizens or within a community” which certainly includes modern Iraq but also the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Other people define it verey precisely in terms of the casualty rate. Which seems to me to describe a scale of fighting, not a type of war.

I had taken it as the proper term to describe a specific kind of internal warfare, between two factions each claiming to be the legitimate government of a region or nation. That situation, common in history, could use a proscribed word or phrase. I thought “civil war” was it.

What’s going on in Iraq today is something I might call religious war. It seems to me closer to Germany in the 1620s than to England in the 1640s; even though both were rooted in religious conflicts, only one is commonly called a civil war.

But, like Michael Yon and some others who have been invoked here, I’m more concerned with how to handle it than with what to call it. I don’t think any of us broadly disagrees with what is happening, only over what to call it.

As to Krauthammer, I did say that I thought the situation in Iraq was within the realm of civil war in November 2004, as he does. He says it’s stayed that way.

I;m starting to agree with the antis that there’s something irksome about phrases like

Now all of a sudden everyone is shocked, shocked to find Iraqis going after Iraqis

when used by people who didn’t talk about this as a likely outcome at the start of the adventure.

Yes, of course, Iraq always was a pressure-cooker of ethnic and religious resentments, and it always was possible that when you took the lid off, it would blow up. But I didn’t support the war from the early stages intending to make that happen. It was what we were supposed to avoid by competent management of the situation and with the help of the large segment of the Iraqi people who were secularized and more interested in having a free hand to create a modern nation for themselves.