When does a rebellion become a revolution? That's easy — when it wins. When does an uprising attain the level of an insurgency and qualify as an insurrection? That's harder to answer because the meanings of those synonyms flow into one another.

And when do all of the preceding amount to a civil war? That term usually denotes the struggle of an armed group of citizens within a nation seeking forcibly to seize control of the government from those in power. But that does not reflect the complexity of the war in Iraq today, which makes it hardest of all to define.

The linguistic dogmas of civil wars past are inadequate to the stormy present. In olden times — a generation or so ago — civil war required each major combatant to control some territory, have a functioning central authority and be recognized by some outside country — or some combination thereof. But guerrilla operations, suicide attacks on civilians, secret foreign support angrily denied, counterfeit uniforms and splintered insurgent forces supported by foreign terrorists make obsolete the past definitions of civil war — especially when the insurgents or terrorists are trying to overthrow a new government backed by a coalition of foreign troops.

Small wonder, then, for the current verbal warfare in the United States over what label we should attach to the hostilities in Iraq. The Bush administration prefers sectarian strife between Shiite and Sunni religious groups, triggered by terrorists and Saddamists backed and supplied by totalitarian Iran and Syria. That language emphasizes the global stakes in the central front of the war on terror and supports goals of ensuring stability of the elected government followed by withdrawal of our troops over time. The furthest that administration spokesmen will go is to use the civil war phrase with qualifiers.

Contrariwise, the departing UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, took the position two weeks ago that civil war was not nearly a strong enough description.

"When we had the strife in Lebanon and other places," he told the BBC, "we called that a civil war. This is much worse."

In the debate among Americans, advocates of a more rapid withdrawal see the coalition led by the U.S. not as building a democracy after liberation from a dangerous dictator but as an interloper in a civil war, and consider it only realistic to press for adoption of that label. In pressing that phrase, they get across the message "We don't belong in the midst of another country's internal conflict."

Soon after the recent U.S. election victory of Democrats, the definers of the nature of the fight as a civil war made a tactical lexical breakthrough in the media. A few days after The Los Angeles Times began describing the fighting in Iraq with that phrase, Matt Lauer of NBC announced that his network had adopted the usage.

Lest this be seen as a "Cronkite moment," recalling the CBS anchor's denunciation of the Vietnam War as being "mired in stalemate," James Poniewozik of Time magazine noted that "polls and common sense indicated that most Americans already believed Iraq's sectarian fighting was a civil war."

The Iraq Study Group's report took pains to avoid the phrase.

In The New York Times, under the headline "A 'Civil War' in Iraq Is Putting Words on Trial in America," its media reporter, David Carr, noted that for months the newspaper had been modifying civil war with phrases like "on the brink of" and "on the verge of.'

Call the fighting what you like, but the name you choose to give the hostilities, strife, violence or war not only reflects your view about the current state of affairs but is also an indication of where you stand on what the policy should be.

Labels are the language's shorthand for judgments.

Extracts of IHT article published on December 17, 2006