NBC has decided to acknowledge the obvious and unequivocally describe Iraq as suffering a civil war.

Most media organizations are not following suit, but because NBC generated considerable notice by publicly announcing the shift, it will likely solidify American perceptions of Iraq.

This development has been deeply feared by the Bushies for obvious reasons:

There is no public support for American troops to be in the crossfire of civil war, nor is there support for our troops to pick a side in a civil war.

But of course, just because it will deepen opposition to the war doesn't make the increasing severity of civil war a great development.

It just means there's a bigger mess that's much tougher to clean up.

As Sen. Joe Biden said back in March:

...in the next six to eight weeks, we don't get something moving in terms of a government ... It'll be closer to a civil war.

We're going to have to have a different function for our troops ... You're going to have to figure out how to contain rather than how to, how to build ... it's bad enough it's a civil war. It'll be a lot worse if it's a regional war.

... If they don't have a constitution in place by this summer that is viewed as a uniting document, where everybody signs on to it, it's game over.

Now, how you pull them out, where you pull them to, whether you have them over the horizon, whether you have a containment policy that secures the region in a different way, that's a whole different question.

Containment is inherently a stopgap move. It's not responsible to sit back and watch a civil war, so it needs to be combined with a political strategy.

Pretty much across the board, Dems have been pushing for the political solution that LiberalOasis discussed here yesterday -- bringing in regional players to help resolve sectarian differences.

But LiberalOasis has also argued that you can't pull that off with permanent military bases in the way.

Rapidly redeploying our military to a containment posture certainly is one way to scrap those bases. Not the only way, but one way.

Specific tactical options aside, the overarching point is that:

With "civil war" becoming more acknowledged, public pressure will increase to protect our troops from a no-win mission.

Democrats need to get ahead of the curve.

Not sit back and wait for the Iraq Study Group to cobble together a mushy committee product -- or worse, blindy accept a half-baked plan and become complicit in continued chaos.

Instead, Dems should retool their plans to explicitly recognize the Iraqi Civil War, and call for a fundamental strategic shift that aims to contain it and resolve the sectarian differences fueling it.

And the worse things get, the harder it will be to come up with plausible proposals to do just that.

But if we want to earn the public trust, maximize our chances to win the White House in '08, and actually have the opportunity to implement sorely needed strategic shifts, we will have to take on some extremely tall orders.