On reading this article today in the LA Times about the ‘correct’ nomenclature for the situation in Syria, I am reminded of the same niceties with regard to Libya, as I wrote in this piece about Libya back in March.
From the LA Time article:
In November, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the violence in Syria was beginning to resemble a civil war, it was viewed by some as a tactic to protect Moscow’s Arab ally from any possibility of foreign intervention.
But a day later, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton echoed the concern. Last week, Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said the conflict amounted to a civil war.
…Beyond the definition favored by political scientists, the accepted concept of a civil war is based on the idea that it is two-sided. But it remains unclear just how two-sided the violence in Syria is.
“It’s a kind of a civil war,” said Andrew Tabler, a Middle East fellow with the Washington Institute. “I think it just gets to a point of, what else can you call it?”
It seems to me that answer is that when outside forces want to get in there and enforce regime change, they call what is happening an attack on defenceless civil population. And when they don’t want to get involved, they call it a civil war.
Ah, politics, you mock us all.