WASHINGTON: There is an idea in mathematics. It describes a series of numbers that is endlessly halved, endlessly approaching but never reaching zero. It is an engine endlessly grinding to a halt but never stopping. That is a perfect model for the endlessly redefined semantics of where Iraq is heading — always moving towards the conditions of civil war but never quite arriving.

Over the past few months a succession of US generals has warned that the country is approaching the conditions of a civil war. Last week, a Congressionally-approved Pentagon report suggested that the conditions for civil war had not only been achieved but that they were spreading outside Baghdad. But still, they insist, it is not in actuality a civil war.

Even as the civilian death toll climbs with each new appalling atrocity, it is a realisation kept deliberately at arm’s length. And not only by the generals and politicians in Washington. There are those too on the anti-war left who similarly want to finesse the figures. Their selective view — factually correct but ignoring the wider picture — argues that because the majority of the attacks are still aimed against the multinational forces, it must be a war of liberation, and when the occupiers leave, then the violence will end.

It is all pretty academic to people like my friend W, who called me from his Baghdad home earlier this summer. A Sunni who lives in an insurgent neighbourhood in the city’s suburbs, he had called to describe an attack by Shia gunmen who had crossed into his district in a mass attack. Trapped in his house he described gunmen on the roofs and the loudspeakers on the mosques directing the battle.

It is all pretty academic, too, to those dying daily in the conflict — to the 64 killed on Friday, or the 14 pilgrims whose bodies were discovered yesterday, ambushed on their way to shrines of Imam Hussain and other martyrs in Kerbala. But to accept that there is a spreading civil war is to acknowledge the nightmare scenario: that the invasion of Iraq has unleashed forces beyond control that threaten the whole region, and that to leave would be as disastrous as to remain — the most poisonous of paradoxes.—Dawn/The Observer News Service