In his 31 January ‘Snowmail’, Channel 4 News presenter John Snow argued “This country is at war and it is, perforce, an extraordinarily under-reported conflict.

“We cannot objectively travel around the places where British and American forces are fighting other than in the very tightest company with them.

“It’s simply too dangerous even for our own indigenous Iraqi journalists. We do infrequently embed our journalists with British and American troops, but that inevitably provides a blinkered perspective.

“All one can do is to report the drip, drip, drip of obvious events – an explosion here, a death there, and often in the plural”.

What the under-reporting of the war conceals is its growing and endless brutality. This has two main features – the deepening of sectarian Sunni-Shi’ite violence to ‘low intensity’ civil war levels, and the turn of American military policy towards action which targets and punishes the civilian population in ‘insurgent’ areas.

This includes the increased use of massive air power against allegedly insurgent towns and villages, which bring inevitable civilian casualties. Massive bombing of civilians of course is a macabre reprise of Vietnam.

According to Associated Press (20 December 2005), “The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have flown thousands of missions in support of US ground troops in Iraq this fall with little attention back home, including attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles…

“The number of US airstrikes increased from a monthly average of about 35 in summer 2004 to more than 60 in September 2005 and 120 or more in October and November.

“The monthly number of air missions, including refueling and other support flights, grew from 1,111 in September 2005 to 1,492 in November, according to figures provided by Central Command Air Force’s public affairs office.”

On 2 February US marines launched another sweep in Western Iraq, this time targeting the historic town of Hit. This took the usual form of massive house-to-house searches and the mass detention of adult men, led off for questioning and an uncertain fate.

In the first few days of February news from Iraq included the killing of US soldiers near the supposedly pacified city of Fallujah, the finding of the bodies of 14 bound and gagged Sunni men in Baghdad and dawn raids in Basra. Four Iraqis were killed in heavy fighting reportedly between the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr and US forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City.

A US army spokeperson said fighting began when US-led forces came under attack during a nighttime raid in the poor, predominantly Shiite district.

“The coalition forces conducted a raid in Sadr City to search for a known terrorist from (the Al-Qaeda-linked) Ansar al-Sunna group.” He said a US helicopter came under fire from some men on a nearby rooftop.

“Another helicopter of the coalition forces returned fire to eliminate the threat,” he said, adding that “four individuals were killed.”

He did not say whether the four dead were members of the Mehdi Army.

An interior ministry official said the fight was between US forces and Sadr’s militia, and that a woman was also killed in the fighting.

Sadr’s militia and US troops have often clashed in the past, most dramatically in August 2004 when the fiery cleric waged a bloody rebellion in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in which hundreds of his men were killed.

These are just a few snippets of the reported war, the tip of the iceberg of the unreported war.

Any objective account would conclude from all this that the occupation of Iraq and US war policy was a failure. Already the war has cost $440bn (as much, in real terms, as the Vietnam war and more than the Korean war) and US military forces are dangerously overstretched – hence Rumsfeld’s attempt to scale down troop commitments to Bosnia and the need to boost British forces in Afghanistan, so US troops can be redeployed westwards

The growing unpopularity of the war was reflected in the downbeat character of Bush’s January 31 State of the Union address.

But the conclusion by the neocon leadership in Washington is the reverse – plough on forever with endless war. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, fresh from comparing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, on February 2 argued that the war against terrorism would be a generation-long conflict like the Cold War (he also likened Osama bin Laden to Hitler and Lenin!).

The determination of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld reg-ime to carry on regardless – regardless of civil war and endless death and cruelty – has hugely dangerous consequences for the Middle East and world politics.

That is connected with the global scope of the ‘war on terrorism’, and the insistence of the neocons – since the very day after 9/11 – that it must include targeting ‘hostile’ states.

At the February 4 Munich ‘security’ conference Rumsfeld insisted that “Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism” and “must never be allowed to gain nuclear weapons”. While he called for a diplomatic solution, it is far from clear that the United States has ruled out military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But there is a problem, and one which highlights the recklessness and unsustainability of the administration’s militarist approach – the fact that 130,00 US troops are next door to Iran in Iraq, and that the leadership of the Shi’ite militias would instantly retaliate against American troops if their confessional brothers and sisters in Iran were attacked. If you want 10,000 American casualties in a week, bomb Iran.

As George Bush, whose one real intellectual achievement is to master colloquial Spanish, put it “in Iraq the Iranians have got America by the cojones”.

If diplomatic action fails, a US attack is not the only other solution. As was the case with the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Tuwaitah, an attack on Iran could be sub-contracted to Israel.

But there are major problems with this option as well. Iran’s nuclear facilities are scattered over a wide area, making a big military operation necessary, and one which could not be certain of success. In addition, Iran’s intermediate range Shahab and Kosar missiles are easily able to hit Israel – and Iran has lots of them.

Moreover on Israel’s Lebanese border is the Hizbollah Shi’ite militia, sponsored and financed by Iran and Syria, which despite its current lack of military operations is armed to the teeth.

In short, an attack on Iran by either the US or Israel poses immense dangers of a regional conflagration, especially as Israel possesses nuclear weapons and could use them if Iran showers its cities with advanced missiles.

Which is why, for the moment, the US talks about a diplomatic solution and the European leaders also do – with much more enthusiasm.

Another key aspect of the ‘war without end’ scenario is the US insistence on transforming NATO to ‘meet the terrorist threat’.

This means that European states must increase their defence spending and swivel their priorities towards ‘asymmetrical warfare’ – ie anti-terrorist, anti-guerrilla warfare operations. All this so they can take more of the burden of the ‘war on terror’, but under American leadership of course.

Iraq today has turned into a charnel house where death and injury, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and the incredible grief of the loss of loved ones can strike anyone, anytime – and already have hundreds of thousands.

This scenario can easily be extended to other parts of the Middle East if the neocons’ crazy dreams – of the endless war – are realised.

Maintaining and remobilising the anti-war movement internationally remains an urgent task, which is why the anti-war demonstrations in Britain and round the world on March 18 are so important.