Two Democratic Senators—Joseph Biden (Del.) and Jack Reed (R.I.)—just returned from a trip to Iraq and took exception to the Administration’s aversion to calling the situation in Iraq a civil war, reports the Congressional newspaper, The Hill. Biden, who is ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters Tuesday, “If you don’t call that a nascent civil war, I don’t know what it is.” Reed, who is a key member of the Armed Services Committee, was slightly more reticent, saying that right now there are not “large-scale forces fighting with each other,” but he called it close to just such a war. Last fall, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was among Administration officials who refused to cast the Iraq situation a civil war, instead preferring the term “subterranean strife.”
Amid a renewed focus on readiness, Congress moved to keep the Air Force’s shrinking combat fleet from getting even smaller in the latest version of its annual defense policy bill, blocking scores of divestments of two major fourth-generation fighters.
