Tell me how this ends,” Gen David Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, asked a Washington Post reporter during the “liberation” of Iraq almost exactly five years ago. That neither Petraeus, now commander of all American forces in Iraq, nor his civilian counterpart, Washington’s ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, was able to offer even the slightest clue as to “how this ends” in Congressional testimony this week added yet one more layer of irony to a war which has systematically defied every prediction of its architects.

“We’ll know when we get there and we don’t know when we’re going to get there,” said Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, an early supporter of the war, after patiently listening to Petraeus and Crocker’s repeated efforts to evade questions about how and when US could withdraw substantial numbers of its combat troops below the 140,000 level that is supposed to be reached in July. There are currently somewhat more than US 160,000 troops in Iraq.

“I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like,” said Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican hawk, whose comments reflected growing frustration within President George W Bush’s own party with the lack of any sense that the administration has any clear “exit strategy” for Iraq.As Bush himself made clear Thursday when he pledged that Petraeus will “have all the time he needs” to decide whether he could afford to further reduce US military presence in Iraq after July without jeopardising what security gains have been achieved over the past year, an exit strategy will almost certainly not materialise between now and Jan 20 next year when the Bush administration comes to an end.

That conflict is likely to become much more intense — and violent — with the approach of regional elections in October, according to Iraq specialists, making it even less likely that US will withdraw more troops before Bush leaves office. “It’s abundantly clear that President Bush is simply trying to ‘run out the clock’ and hand off the mess to the next president,” observed Sen. Edward Kennedy. As grim as that conclusion appeared to be by the end of the week, some observers noted that the administration’s focus on Iran and its “nefarious” role in Iraq raised anew the spectre of a much larger “mess” that Bush might yet leave to his successor.

In addition, Vice President Dick Cheney, the leader of the administration’s Iran hawks, came out of his usual seclusion this week to describe President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an interview this week as “a very dangerous man... who believes... that the highest honour that can befall a man is that he should die a martyr in facilitating the return of the 12th imam.”

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to “destroy Israel”, he noted, adding that the deterrence strategy used by Washington against Moscow would not work with Tehran. “Mutual assured destruction with Ahmadinejad is an incentive,” he said. “You have to be concerned about that.” — IPS