We do not speak about the French Civil War of 1789 or the American Civil War of 1776. When armed thugs of the Mubarak regime attacked peaceful demonstrators recently in Tahrir Square, no one called it the Egyptian Civil War. It would be equally wrong to call the conflict in Libya a “civil war.” ~Paul Wolfowitz

Just like that, Wolfowitz has made sure that we can ignore the rest of his column. That’s a good thing, but I still find it amazing that Wolfowitz thinks that the best way to start his argument is to argue that we should not describe the Libyan civil war with the right words. What doesn’t make sense is that Wolfowitz understands the definition of civil war. He just wants to pretend that this doesn’t apply to Libya:

Scholars generally define civil war as a conflict between organized groups within a country that aim to take power at the center or in a region.

That’s right. Doesn’t the Libyan opposition claim to be an organized group with the aim to take power in Tripoli and to establish a new government for the entire country? That it is a badly-organized group isn’t the point. They purport to be the legitimate government of all of Libya, and they seek to replace the existing government. During the the war of 1861-65, which most Americans conventionally refer to as the Civil War, the Confederacy never made such a claim on the North.

The Egyptian example is irrelevant to this discussion. Clearly, we have seen large popular protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities from January 25 until today calling for Mubarak’s removal and then for continued political reform. If one wished to be premature, one could go so far as to call it a revolution, but at the very least it was a movement for political and civil rights. The protesters sometimes resisted against police brutality and the use of hired thugs, but on the whole they responded non-violently to the regime’s attempts to crack down on them.

When something similar happened in Libya, the protesters armed themselves and launched an insurrection against the government. One can sympathize with them, one can say that they are justified in what they’re doing, but what one cannot do is say that they are not fighting a civil war. They are seeking to overthrow the existing ruler and seize control of the government of Libya by force, and they are fighting against their fellow countrymen (as well as foreign mercenaries) to do this. That is very much consistent with the definition of a civil war as opposed to a war of secession or a violent popular revolution.

No one calls the French Revolution the French Civil War because the revolutionaries won and succeeded in defining the events of 1789-99 on their terms. Had the outcome of the internal struggle in France, especially in the Vendee, been different, that period of political struggle might be remembered very differently. Indeed, among many people in that region of France, the revolution has been remembered very differently. The war in the Vendee has sometimes even been referred to as a “Franco-French genocide,” and the revolutionaries were the ones engaged in much of the slaughter, but this was the product of a war between groups of French citizens, which is to say a civil war. Wolfowitz doesn’t mention the Russian example, but it was certainly the case that a revolution led to a prolonged armed struggle over control of the state that the Bolsheviks ended up winning. No one would claim that this was not a civil war.

The American War for Independence certainly contained elements of armed violence by one group of citizens against another, especially in certain colonies where Loyalists had greater numbers. Technically, ours was a war for independence in which some of our citizens sided with the British government, but especially in New Jersey and South Carolina there were all the hallmarks of a society sharply divided between loyalists and rebels. Obviously, a more relevant example would be the armed struggle between King and Parliament in England in the 1640s, which was both a revolution in its challenge to the authority of the monarchy and a civil war in that it was an armed conflict over control of the state. This is sometimes referred to as the English revolution, or even in some books the “Puritan revolution,” but it is much more commonly known as the English Civil War. What is happening right now in Ivory Coast is the beginning of a civil war, and it is proving to be no less gruesome and horrible than what is happening in Libya, except that in this case it is the successful rebel side endorsed by most of the governments in the world that is carrying out mass atrocities.

Civil war is the appropriate, more neutral description of an armed conflict over control of a state between two factions. Revolution may be the appropriate word to describe sudden political change, but much of the time it is chosen for propaganda purposes to make outsiders more sympathetic to a particular cause. Wolfowitz would prefer it if Westerners adopted the word that the Libyan rebels have chosen to describe their cause. This isn’t because civil war is an inaccurate description of what is happening. It is because civil war is all together too accurate, and it is making it harder to promote a more aggressive U.S. policy in Libya, because Americans are appropriately more wary of inserting the U.S. in the middle of someone else’s civil war. It is inconvenient for Wolfowitz that the description that is more useful to the Gaddafis politically also happens to be the more accurate description.

Wolfowitz’s insistence that we not call the Libyan civil war what it is leads up predictably to yet another call to recognize the Transitional National Council as the Libyan government. In other words, after arguing that the conflict in Libya is not a civil war, he wants us to align the U.S. officially with the weaker side in the civil war. If calling things by their proper names helps to keep the U.S. from compounding the error of intervention, that would be good, but we should strive to use the correct names for things whether or not this advances our preferred policies.