The star Online
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Former US president Jimmy Carter said the Iraq war was one of the "greatest blunders" ever made by a US leader.
Carter however, said on CNN yesterday that he believed the raging sectarian violence wracking the US-occupied country so far fell short of a civil war.
"I think that the original invasion of Iraq, and all of its consequences, yes, were a blunder," Carter said.
"It's going to prove, I believe, to be one of the greatest blunders that American presidents have ever made."
Asked whether the Iraq war would prove to be a bigger mistake in the annals of US foreign policy than the war in Vietnam, he answered: "I think it is going to be a close call Â… but perhaps much more vividly known by the rest of the world than Vietnam was."
The former president, who served from 1977 to 1981, said, however, President George Bush could still navigate a way out of Iraq that could be defined as a victory, by agreeing to an international conference on the conflict.
Carter also added his voice to the semantic debate on how to describe the fighting, saying he did not think it amounted to the kind of civil war in which his Carter Centre human rights foundation had intervened.
"I think a civil war is a more serious circumstance than exists in Iraq," he said, but added that it was not really important how the conflict was described.
Bush, during a visit to Latvia for the Nato summit, earlier sidestepped suggestions Iraq had sunk into civil war, arguing that a recent upsurge in violence was part of a spiral of sectarian unrest that began nine months ago.
White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said the Iraqis "don't talk of it as a civil war" because the army and police had not fractured along sectarian lines and the government continued to hold together.
MSNBC, NBC's cable network, yesterday displayed a graphic reading "Iraq: The Civil War" in its Iraq coverage. Other US networks said they would continue reporting under broader terms like "War in Iraq."
The shift in coverage reflects a growing consensus among foreign-policy experts that the conflict is a civil war, said American University communications professor Chris Simpson.
"When those elites shift, the media typically follows," Simpson said. "To some extent the media do play a role in shaping that opinion, but mostly they follow it."
The Los Angeles Times said it had adopted the term in October "without public fanfare," making it the first major news outlet to use the term.
The Christian Science Monitor and McClatchy Newspapers, which include the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, are among the other newspapers that have described the bloodshed as a civil war.
The New York Times said it would use the term sparingly and not to the exclusion of other labels, as the conflict also has elements of an insurgency, an occupation, a battle against terrorism and "a scene of criminal gangsterism". - Sapa-AFP and Reuters