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.”
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