NBC label of civil war at odds with White House

Jordan's King Abdullah said on Sunday that civil war was looming in Iraq and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned Monday that the country was nearly in civil war.

Bush and Maliki are scheduled to meet in Jordan this week to discuss ways to stem the violence.

Experts differ on how to define a civil war and which conflicts fall into that category. While Shiites and Sunnis are not organized into formal armies, the rising level of sectarian violence has led many to conclude that a de facto civil war is under way.

"It's getting silly for the administration or anyone else to deny there's a civil war," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who said the February bombing of a Shiite shrine marked the transition from an anti-American insurgency to civil war.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, said he does not believe the country has yet descended into civil war because most of the population is not involved in the violence.

But he said: "The bottom line on the American role is it will leave if it feels it has to take sides in order to continue operating in Iraq."

Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told Congress in August that "the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

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