Fred Kaplan: “We’re not pulling out of Iraq, so it’s logical that we’re pushing in deeper. And so it’s official: ‘Postwar Iraq’ is just another term for ‘Iraq War—Phase II.’

In a heavily guarded news conference in Baghdad today, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the state of conflict there a ‘war.’ John Burns, the New York Times correspondent covering the event, quotes Sanchez’s aides noting that the general’s choice of words was deliberate—his way of injecting realism into the debate back in Washington. ‘We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country,’ Sanchez stated. That sounds like war, all right.” —Slate