From the Pew Research Center…

A mostly insiders-only debate about whether Iraq is in a state of civil war broke out into the open last week when two major news organizations announced that they would henceforth refer to the conflict as a civil war. According to polling in September by the Pew Research Center, much of the public had already reached that conclusion. By a 50%-to-37% margin, more Americans said the current violence in Iraq was mostly a civil war than said it was mostly an insurgency aimed at the United States and its allies.

Interestingly, whether respondents thought it was a civil war or an insurgency didn’t seem to affect their attitudes towards whether the US should stay in Iraq.