The war over words.

Byline: The Register-Guard

President Bush has no choice but to deny that Iraq is engulfed in a civil war. To allow the catastrophe he has spawned to be characterized as a civil war could cause waning public patience to disappear entirely.

If the American public - 63 percent of which already opposes the Iraq war, according to the latest CNN poll - comes to believe that U.S. troops are now dying as referees in an intractable internal power struggle rather than in an effort to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, pressure for a quick withdrawal would skyrocket.

It doesn't help that the president himself has promised the men and women of the armed forces that he would not allow U.S. troops to be caught "in the crossfire between rival factions." The administration's insistence that Iraq is the `central front in the war on terror' becomes nonsensical if, in reality, Iraq is at war with itself.

Bush has become so desperate to divert the discussion from the term "civil war" that he has resorted to blaming al-Qaeda for the sectarian violence that has claimed more than 120 civilian lives a day for the past two months. But falling back on the all-purpose enemy to shore up public support has lost its potency now that U.S. troops have been bogged down in Iraq longer than they fought in World War II.

Granted, there's no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a civil war. But neither is there such disagreement that the term is meaningless.

Mainstream dictionaries all include definitions describing civil war as a violent conflict involving political or religious factions within the same country seeking to control territory or the central government.

Scholarly definitions are more precise. University of Michigan professors Errol Henderson and J. David Singer, whose treatise "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92' analyzed dozens of such conflicts, developed these criteria for a civil war:

"Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain."

None other than Colin Powell, Bush's former secretary of state and a general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that the Iraq conflict was now a civil war. He added that the Bush administration should acknowledge that reality and deal with it ac- cordingly.

Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there is no question that the situation on the ground in Iraq constitutes civil war. He flatly labels the argument over terminology "a remarkably silly semantic debate" that does nothing to address the mounting violence.

Unfortunately for President Bush, the news media have begun to ignore the White House spin and are now accepting the judgment of most scholars and foreign policy experts. Iraq is being torn apart by an obvious civil war that, in terms of civilian casualties, ranks among the worst in modern times.

On Monday, NBC News announced that `after careful consideration,' it decided that `the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as a civil war.'

The Los Angeles Times has been calling the violence a civil war since October. The New York Times said it will use the term whenever it feels it is appropriate.

This isn't about jumping on a semantic bandwagon. It's about accepting reality - even if the White House is determined, for obvious reasons, to deny it.

Bush's promise not to put U.S. troops in an internal Iraqi crossfire became meaningless after the February bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. American soldiers are caught daily between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias whose hatred for the U.S. occupation is second only to their hatred for each other.

Iraq has been and continues to be in the grip of an escalating civil war. Saying it isn't only perpetuates a state of denial that delays the inevitable withdrawal of U.S. troops even as it sacrifices more of their lives in a lost cause.