Regarding a briefing to top Bush Administration officials by the CIA’s Iraq analysts on November 11, 2003, Iraq mission manager Robert Grenier said: ” ‘We were trying to convey that this was a full-blown insurgency. I kept saying that it was sort of the functional equivalent of civil war.’ Grenier says the mood of the meeting was ‘heavily colored by the presence of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who interrupted one of the analysts who had first used the term insurgency to ask him why he had used that word, explaining, *This is not a term that we should use publicly because it conveys legitimacy on them that we obviously don’t want to convey.* ‘ The analyst countered that what was happening in Iraq conformed to the Pentagon’s own definition of an insurgency. Grenier recalls that Bush then said, ‘We’re not calling it an insurgency. So fine, within the room, we can call it what we want. But just so you all understand, we are not going to go out of here and call it an insurgency.’ “
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 158