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I caught Michael Medved's radio show today, and was interested to hear him talking about the Left's rather incoherent obsession with labeling the conflict in Iraq as a "civil war." Most of Medved's points are also articulated in his townhall.com blog post from earlier this morning. In brief, Medved takes issue with a common assertion that the U.S. shouldn't be involved in Iraq because the fighting in Iraq constitutes a civil war, the apparent fundamental assumption being that getting involved in civil wars is a bad idea. Medved then offers an exhaustive list of civil wars in which the U.S. has been involved, to beneficial effect. Case closed, more or less. Medved also makes the quite relevant point that the conflict in Iraq is not a civil war, at least not by the strictest definition, which holds that a civil war is one in which two or more factions enjoying broad civil support—that's the civil part—engage in warfare over control of the same country. By this standard, for example, America's War Between the States was not properly a civil war because the southern states had seceeded from the Union, thus forming (albeit briefly) a completely separate country. The War happened when the United States of America invaded the newly formed Confederate States of America, and was in fact fought almost exclusively within CSA territory. There's an argument to be made—and Medved made it on the radio this afternoon—that the primary reason why we came to call this conflict the "Civil War" is that the phrase had significant propaganda value to the Union, which faced some internal argument as to whether losing the southern states was really an issue worth going to war over. Judging by its current popularity in the media, the phrase retains its propaganda value to this day. I agree with Medved's analysis so far as it goes, but he's such a student of American history that I'm surprised he missed what seems to me an obvious and rather delicious point. Here it is: if the War Between the States was a "civil war," then so was the American Revolution! All the same elements were there, most importantly the secession of a geographically distinct population from its parent state. Now, though I'm nobody's francophile, I would be remiss not to point out that, without the timely intervention of the Marquis de Lafayette, Admiral DeGrasse, and a flotilla of French warships, there would have been no British surrender at Yorktown, no Treaty of Paris, and quite possibly no United States of America. You'd have to be a pretty true-blue America-hater to see that civil-war intervention as having been a bad idea.
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