Is this a civil war?

A very interesting “blog of blogs” demonstrating the power of the Internet to decentralize and recreate the flows of information. A blog that centralizes the known source of local information from Iraq and the middle east. Mostly in English. Why the quotation marks in “Civil war”? See below…

Iraqi Bloggers Central
On November 27, 2006, NBC News announced it would begin referring to the conflict in Iraq as a “Civil War”. For many, this was a “told ya so”, or “duh, ya think?” moment. One of the earliest articles I found on calling Iraq a “Civil War” is this one by William S. Lind on antiwar.com from July 22nd, 2004. It may very well be that earlier articles proclaiming Iraq a Civil War are out there. I just didn’t want to take the time to sort through 18 million hits on “Iraq Civil War” from Google. Certainly many many people have been calling it a civil war, including plenty of Iraqi bloggers. Although the White House disputed the label, others such as MSNBC host Keith Olbermann suggested it was a “Cronkite” moment – referring to the point in the Vietnam War where Walter Cronkite called Vietnam as a “stalemate”.