A couple nights ago on the News Hour there was suppose to be some sort of debate on whether we can call what's happening in Iraq a Civil War but having watched the segment I was left dumbfounded at to what lengths the distinguished scholars refused to address the question.  On the one hand Donald Kagan, Yale Historian and Classicist whose contribution to the discussion was best summed up with his open volley:

 DONALD KAGAN, Professor of History, Yale University: Frankly, I regard this as a frivolous discussion on the one hand, and on the other hand it is a calculated effort on the part of those people who would like to see the United States flee from its responsibilities in Iraq, to use a term that is more frightening, more dangerous-sounding than simply the kind of uprising that they've been dealing with, and decide that it's a civil war, in order to make it a more frightening prospect to try to win this thing and to persuade Americans that it's hopeless and that they should go away.

The News Hour neglected to inform us that Prof. Kagan was hardly a disinterested party in the discussion having been a long-time Iraq War booster as a fellow at the Hudson Institute and a signatory to Project for a New American Century , an organization which help lay the ground work for our current mess.  You see Prof. Kagan views this discussion purely as a political matter that, given his loyalties, really can't be debated based upon the facts on the ground only in terms of our overall resolve.  Prof. Betts was a little more forthcoming but at pains not to overreach:

RICHARD BETTS, Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University: Well, there's no definition of civil war that's chiseled in stone. I'd call it an emerging civil war. It's more complicated than the image most people have of civil wars as a two-way conflict between, say, one group of rebels and a government.

I don't think we should get hung up on the label, as long as we focus on the extent to which the shape of the war has been changing and the main lines of division in the conflict have been changing. And at least the term "civil war" does focus attention on that.

For the first few years after the invasion, the conflict was mainly between a group of insurgents on one hand and the Americans on the other. It's been changing in recent months more clearly into a conflict between two main groups of Iraqis, with the Americans and the Iraqi government more or less caught in the middle trying to put the lid on both of them.

That's right, its all too complicated and we really can't find a solid definition of "civil war" throughout history which suggest either the term needs to be retired or we've been using it indiscriminately for centuries.  Instead of bringing on an expert who can explain a general criteria for what constitutes a civil war and why, we're provided with a neo-con Classicist with an agenda whose counterpoint seems to be afraid the newspapers might quote him on the topic?  Does it need to be so complicated?