From the people who brought you the "struggle against global extremism" and the "struggle against the enemies of freedom and civilization" comes a new and exciting term: "sectarian violence perpetuated by the enemies of freedom."
These are the ever-so-euphemistic words that President Bush has been using to characterize the internal struggle in Iraq.
While this is an eloquent description of the continuing (and escalating) strife in the region, the tireless writers at the Los Angeles Times, NBC News and the New York Times have come up with something a bit snappier: civil war.
The current administration has so far refused to accept this assessment, with President Bush as recently as yesterday asserting that the situation in Iraq is simply "an important part of an ideological struggle."
Like the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in 2003 and Vice President Dick Cheney's contention in May 2005 that the insurgency was in its "last throes," this latest fight against public opinion seems both pointless and detrimental.
Although those involved in the anti-war effort were optimistic that a change in control of Congress would soften the president's approach to Iraq policy, this does not seem to have occurred.
Even as Nixon-era hawk Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by William Gates (and every child in Iraq briefly hoped for a new computer), Bush has insisted on defining the war on his own terms.
Under other circumstances, this game of semantics would be fine. If President Bush wants to re-label his warrantless wiretap program a "surveillance program," so be it.
If he feels it is necessary to change the suicide count at Guantanamo Bay Prison to the number of "manipulative self-injurious behaviors," we can buy that.
If, after six years in office, the President of the United States still needs to refer to "nucular weapons," we can even (grudgingly) let that go.
But this is just ludicrous. What we have now is a blatant refusal by the president and his administration to acknowledge the dire nature of the situation on the ground.
This is a situation in which thousands of American soldiers have been killed in a country that is currently tearing itself apart, and the president is eschewing a loaded term for fear that it will pull the plug on any remaining support.
The state of denial that exists in Bush's bubble is staggering.
Even as the Baker-Hamilton commission seems poised to suggest a huge drawdown of troops, the White House created its own commission to study the issue and Bush spent yesterday publicly scoffing at the notion that troop levels would decrease in the near future, "before victory is achieved."
The administration's strategy at this point seems to be to deny things are going badly and hope they improve. Merely hoping, while admirable, is not a strategy.
Staying the course (which Bush insists he never said, though millions of YouTube viewers would disagree) is not a strategy. Good strategy is born of realistic assessments and realistic goals.
New York Times editor Bill Keller believes that the main shortcoming of the phrase "civil war" as a description of the conflict in Iraq is that it fails to capture the complexity of the situation on the ground.
The war in Iraq, he says, is "an occupation, a Baathist insurgency, a sectarian conflict, a front in a war against terrorists, a scene of criminal gangsterism and a cycle of vengeance."
With all those terms to choose from, you would think the administration would jump at the chance to use a pleasant euphemism like "civil war."
