IT IS rare that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, is lost for words. Yet last week he was subjected to a tirade of criticism for his conduct of the war in Iraq from Senator Hillary Clinton, the Democrat favourite for president in 2008.

“Yes we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic incompetence and record of blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy,” Clinton charged at a hearing of the Senate armed services committee. “Given your track record . . . why should we believe your assurances now?”

Rumsfeld, who had not wanted to appear before the committee at all, reeled. “My goodness,” he said, before embarking on an explanation of “the unfortunate and tragic thing that’s taking place”.

The defence secretary could not bring himself to say the phrase, civil war, but his top commanders did it for him. Their assessment was almost as blunt as that of William Patey, Britain’s envoy to Iraq, who warned in a parting letter to London that the country was in a “low intensity civil war” with diminishing prospects of achieving a stable democracy.

General John Abizaid, the head of US forces in the Middle East, told the Senate committee that the sectarian violence was “probably as bad as I have seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war”.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Peter Pace, backed him up. “We do have the possibility of that developing into civil war.” He went on to say: “Shi’ite and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other.”

If there was any doubt about the enduring nature of the conflict, Pace came up with the very same phrase that Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, used in frustration about the attitude of “the Arabs” towards her young nation. That was in 1957 and, as the fighting in Lebanon demonstrates, there is still no peace in the Middle East.

The statistics in Iraq tell their own grim story. Over the course of the year, the number of violent killings of civilians has risen from 1,178 in January to 3,149 in June, the latest period for which figures are available.

Despite the death two months ago of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, there were 858 bombings in July. Yesterday there were two blasts in a market in Baqouba, not far from where the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department, said it was encouraging that the two top generals “were finally seen to be telling a little bit of the truth”, but that the situation in Iraq was much worse than they admitted.

“It already is a civil war,” Wilkerson said. “Even if the killings continue at the same rate of 40 to 100 a day, the figures are staggering. There are more deaths in Iraq than in Lebanon.”

The generals’ admission that Iraq could slide into civil war has left Americans wondering what kind of country their nation is fighting to defend.

With each new revelation of an atrocity by US troops, such as the alleged massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha, Americans fear their soldiers are becoming twisted and corrupted by a war that they are losing the ability to win.

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