Another word for 'bullshit'

Bowing from intense pressure from Howlin’ Leroy Eenk, the Associated Press filed a story Wednesday attempting to present Americans with the linguistic dilemma reporters are facing: does countrymen killing each other over religious, political and ethnic divisions constitute a civil war even when our government insists it doesn’t?

Mar 15, 3:06 PM (ET)
By Charles J. Hanley — Sameer N. Yacoub contributed.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Deep within the Pentagon, they're trying to piece together a picture of an Iraqi civil war. What would it look like?

Here on the streets of Baghdad, it looks like hell.

Corpses, coldly executed, are turning up by the minibus-load. Mortar shells are casually lobbed into rival neighborhoods. Car bombs are killing people wholesale, while assassins hunt them down one by one.

Is it civil war? "In Iraq it is no longer a matter of definition - 'civil war' or 'war' or 'violence' or 'terrorism.' It is all of the above," said one familiar with all of the above, Beirut scholar-politician Farid Khazen, a witness to Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.

It's only a term from a dictionary, defined as a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country. But once media headlines begin referring to the "Iraq civil war," it will mark not only an escalation of vocabulary, but of international concern.

"By the standard that political scientists use, there's been a civil war going on in Iraq since sovereignty was handed over to the interim government in 2004," said Stanford University's James Fearon, who has done detailed studies of modern internal conflicts.

One threshold political scientists use is a casualty toll of 1,000 dead, "and this conflict is way over that," Fearon said. Besides the more than 2,000 U.S. dead here, at least 33,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003, says the British anti-war group Iraq Body Count, whose count, drawn from media reports, does not subdivide the deaths into categories.

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This is a departure from the AP’s usual boilerplate and inverted pyramids. It’s not as interesting as it should be, partly because it eschews analysis for quotes from experts.