“I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war.”

Semantic conspiracy: History will record that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 to depose Saddam Hussein had the unintended consequence of triggering a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. That much is clear. What is less clear is when our politicians and the media will be forced to come to terms with the reality on the ground in the new Iraq.

For the rest of us, it is past time to call the mess in Mesopotamia what it is — the Iraqi Civil War:

[BRIAN UNGER, substituting for Keith Olbermann on Countdown last night]: Jonathan, before anything else, I‘d like to get your take on whether this is or isn‘t a civil war in Iraq.

[JONATHAN ALTER, writer for Newsweek]: You know, I think it clearly is, by any historical standard. I mean, what are people waiting for, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant to get out there before they call it a civil war. A scholar in the “New York Times” recently went through about 10 recent wars that were categorized as civil wars, and none of them was as bad as this.

You know, so I think what‘s going on here is a semantic game where the media doesn‘t want to start calling it a civil war before the politicians do, because then they will be accused of liberal bias and the Democrats don‘t want to call it a civil war, because they‘ll be accused of lack of, you know, patriotism by the Republicans. And, of course, the administration doesn‘t want to call it that because it will confirm it‘s a fiasco.

So, everybody has this kind of semantic conspiracy to not call the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room.

The same cabal of conniving Republicans, million-dollar Kool Kids in the DC media and spineless Democrats who pretended to be blind to the false rationale for invading Iraq in 2002 is obfuscating the fact that our mission there has changed in 2006. We were conquerers then but now the billion-dollar robocop of the U.S. military is deployed as a beat cop, trying to keep the peace in the midst of a civil war.