NOT ENDLESS

“WE'LL be there until we've finished the job” was once a frequently heard statement from President Bush on the duration of the American presence in Iraq. But it is now clear that although US forces will be in Iraq for an undetermined length of time their eventual withdrawal will be under a new Commander-in-Chief. Mr Bush will end his tour of duty in January without finishing the job. During the US Senate hearings this past week General Petraeus, the Iraq commander, was unable to satisfy Hillary Clinton's pertinent enquiry: “What is the end game in Iraq?” Nor, perhaps understandably, did he respond to Barak Obama's suggestion that US ambitions in Iraq should be to accept “a messy, sloppy status quo”. On Thursday President Bush defined the reason for America's presence in Iraq in this way: “Iraq is the convergence point for two of the greatest threats to America in this new century: Al Qaeda and Iran.” If that is indeed true Mr Bush should also accept responsibility for having made it so. Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq before the 2003 invasion and Iran's relations with Iraq were at best cool. Through ignorance and incompetence President Bush has turned the relatively simple task of deposing Saddam Hussein into an open-ended conflict with negative implications in much of the world. Still, his successor should be consoled with his assurance that “While this war is difficult it is not endless.”