Issues, Round 2: Key Phrases Shape Election

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Breaking Ranks? Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in August that Iraq could slide into civil war if sectarian violence is not stopped.

When you hear voters talking about "civil war" in Iraq, you know where this election is heading.

Iraq was supposed to be called "the central front in the war on terror," in the words of President Bush and the rest of the Republican regime. Administration acolytes in Congress used the same formulation, with a few zealots even adopting the military's argot ("Operation Iraqi Freedom") in their floor speeches.

The president regularly refers to a "fledgling democracy" in Iraq, suggesting a plucky people resisting some alien evil even as he conjures our own nation's early years of independence from tyranny. Everything about the phrase tends to engage the sympathies, and so the rationale for the U.S. mission in Iraq is reinforced.

In this same vein, the president has cast the crisis as a challenge to "stay the course" -- scorning critics for wanting to "cut and run."

But for all the repetition of this language in recent months, the references to "civil war" keep popping up. Perhaps the most pivotal mention came in early August from Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East.

Asked to sum up the security situation in Iraq, Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I believe 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."

Abizaid spoke these words even as his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, sat at few feet away at the same table.

The phrase "civil war" is powerful, in part because it recalls the divisive national debate over the U.S. presence in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Critics of the policy called the long-running battles in that country a civil war, while defenders said the U.S. was helping a young democracy fend off communist aggression.

When you hear "civil war," all the images of the war in Iraq turn negative. You start wondering what part outsiders (such as ourselves) ought to have in such a conflict. Can we really referee the vicious, internecine bloodletting we see on TV night after night? Is there a way our presence there can be anything but counterproductive?

And, most important of all the questions raised by the idea of a civil war: Whatever our original design, will our troops, in the end, be caught in the squeeze?

It's not hard to see how all the political implications change, depending on which words for this war are in the air -- or on the air. All of which illustrates a longstanding campaign axiom. If you're setting the terms of the debate, you're winning the debate.

This kind of verbal jousting has been going on forever, i.e. "pro-life" versus "pro-choice." If you talk about the economy in terms of "job growth," you're almost surely a Republican. If you'd rather talk about "job security," you're probably not.

But this fall's election season has become exceptionally difficult for the Republican regime, and not just because talk of "civil war" in Iraq is increasingly common.

As Election Day nears, certain issues are gaining salience even as they defy the usual rhetorical rules. That is to say, a single set of terms is ascendant for these issues -- there is no competing terminology. This does not offer much solace to the party in power.

When you hear voters talking about Mark Foley, or Dennis Hastert, or the "congressional page scandal," you know what is being discussed, and there is no alternate term or euphemism to soften the impact. When you hear voters responding to talk of "corruption" or "ethics in government" -- and when you see these terms suddenly rising as voting issues in the polls -- you know that years of effort by watchdog groups and the out-of-power party are finally paying off.

And that's why the GOP has the warning flags out, snapping smartly in the wind.