"You drive in a minibus on your way to work. Suddenly, there's a checkpoint. If you're of the wrong faith, you are dead... If that's not civil war ... then honestly I don't know what is," argues Michael Ware, Baghdad correspondent for CNN, in Britain's Guardian newspaper. Ware's comment is one of many contributions to a debate sparked by an announcement from U.S. television channel NBC News that from now on it will refer to the Iraq conflict as "civil war".

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. administration isn't happy. The Guardian quotes U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley: "The Iraqis don't talk of it as a civil war, the unity government doesn't talk of it as a civil war... the government continues to be holding together..."

Perhaps he hasn't read the claim of Iraq's former prime minister Ayad Allawi, published in the U.S. media in March: "We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more - if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Another rebuff to Hadley's view comes from Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel. Iraq is a failed state, he tells the Guardian, and cannot provide security, so the fact that the government remains in place is irrelevant to the debate about whether the conflict is a civil war.

What about other media outlets? The New York Times and Los Angeles Times have been using the controversial phrase for some time. Britain's Guardian uses the term, but adds "or something very much like it".

Associated Press which, as The Guardian says, "often sets the agenda for the rest of the U.S. media", is still undecided and its staff are still debating the issue. BBC's world news editor Jon Williams confirms that the BBC will continue to refrain from using the term, and reasons that one short phrase simply can't explain the complex situation in Iraq.

But what exactly constitutes civil war? John Keegan, defence editor of Britain's Daily Telegraph, and Bartle Bull, international editor for Britain's monthly Prospect, give their view in Prospect magazine.

"Could Iraq be the first civil war ever without battles, generals, explicit war aims, the use of partisan public rhetoric by civilian leaders, mass public participation and targets of a predominantly military nature?" they ask. Because those are the civil war ingredients missing from the conflict in Iraq...

Civil war has three main components, according to Keegan and Bull. It must be "civil", it has to be "war" and the aim of the struggle has to be "the exercise or the acquisition of national authority". This third component is key, and apart from state actors, state police and the army, the other sides in Iraq's conflict - different Shia and Sunni factions - have never claimed their struggle was for the sole authority of the state. Thus, it's more of a "politico-military struggle for power" than civil war, they conclude.

Barry Lando, author of the forthcoming book "Web of Deceit" about the role of the West in Iraq, has a more simple answer. Just count the dead, he says, and you'll know "we've been there for a while".

It's worse than that, argues New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Iraq is broken into so many pieces, "divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army", that the conflict can't be said to constitute civil war, he argues.

But Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria says there's no doubt Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, quoting a White House deputy press secretary who spoke of "terrorists ... targeting innocents in a brazen effort to topple a democratically elected government". Such thinking misinterprets the reality of Iraq today, he concludes.

The Guardian's leader turns to the U.S. public: "...public opinion in democracies is not concerned with fine points, but ... whether the judgments of their governments have taken their countries toward disaster or toward success."

So whose arguments hold more weight? While academic squabbles about the finer details of how to label the conflict seem likely to continue, CNN's Michael Ware speaks from the ground: "...anyone who still remains in doubt about whether this is civil war or not is suffering from the luxury of distance."

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