It's Not a Civil War

Powerline defines "civil war" this way:

...the term "civil war" connotes a disaster of epic proportions, and certainly something qualitatively worse than internal violence that falls short of civil war.

See? It's not a civil war because civil war is defined as something much worse than something that's not as bad as a civil war. So as long as someone can characterize what's going on in Iraq as something slightly less bad as civil war, then, by definition, it's not a civil war. It won't be a civil war until it gets worse than that - worse than something less worse.

No problem.