Semantics (NBC Calls It What It Is: Civil War)

This is so insulting (on both ends):

Bucking White House, NBC says Iraq in 'civil war'

WASHINGTON -- NBC's "Today Show" host Matt Lauer yesterday told millions of American television viewers, many sitting at their breakfast tables, that the network would buck the White House and from now on describe the Iraq war as a "civil war."

So NBC had decided to call the situation in Iraq a "Civil War."

Well... how can I put this eloquently... DUH!

What took them so long? Coming to this conclusion so late is insulting. Of course, even more insulting is the decision by others, especially the Bush administration, to say it is anything but a civil war.

Let's look at the definition:

civil war

Main Entry: civil war
Function: noun
: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

That could not be more clear, and you would have to be an idiot (e.g. George W Bush) not to know that the conflict in Iraq fits that definition.

Now, I know that there is more involved in the semantics of this. Politically, if the Bush administration called it a civil war, they would be admitting failure which they would never do (unless you believe in torture like they do, but I do not and am 100% against it).

However, we need to call it a civil war because we cannot respond to and try to stop a civil war if do not even admit that it exists.

Semantics are important when they have implications over life and death, and those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

Semantics played an important role in the failure of the world to stop the Rwandan Genocide.

Ambassador Rawson stayed in Rwanda for ten days after the genocide was first unleashed, before returning to Washington. It was only on April 28-a full three weeks into the slaughter- that he officially declared a "state of disaster." Then he characterized the genocide as tribal killings-exactly the description the killers wanted as a smokescreen for their program of extermination. Had he or any other official invoked the word "genocide," all nations who were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have been obligated by the terms of that treaty to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it...

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, an accomplished lawyer, instructed his staff to avoid calling the situation in Rwanda genocide, but merely to say that "acts of genocide may have been committed." Ambassador Rawson went one better: "As a responsible government, you don't just go round hollering 'genocide. 'You say that acts of genocide may have occurred and they need to be investigated." The media rightly mocked this piece of legal obfuscation, and Christopher disingenuously conceded, "If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that." (Rawson has since compared the killings to a war crime, carefully avoiding the term "genocide.")

Today, we see this same sort of parsing of words over the genocide in Darfur and the civil war in Iraq.

While we argue over the meanings of words, people are dying.

So congratulations, George W Bush. Once again, by your words and your lies, you are responsible for the deaths of thousands. It is true what they say; when Clinton lied, nobody died. Yet he was still impeached... for nothing.

Well, let me be clear in my words so that there can be no confusion or parsing:

Torture is wrong.

Waterboarding is torture.

Iraq is in a civl war.

Those murdered in Darfur are victims of genocide.

Bush is a liar.

IMPEACH BUSH.