Graphic: the changing perspectives

“WE ARE making it clear that America’s patience [in Iraq] is not unlimited,” President Bush declared on Wednesday. “Yet we will not put more pressure on the Iraqi Government than it can bear.”

This is the predicament that has paralysed the world’s superpower.

The United States is desperate to leave the scene of one of its worst miscalculations, yet it cannot afford to go while that would leave Iraq a failed state and the world’s confidence in US judgment and power destroyed.

“We are stuck with each other,” said one senior Administration official of the US and Iraq. “It’s a defeat for us as much as a defeat for them if we abandon them.”

But with less than two weeks to go before congressional elections widely seen as a referendum on Iraq and on the Bush Administration’s competency, Republicans look set to lose control of at least one house of Congress for the first time in 12 years. Senator Lindsey Graham, like many Republicans distancing himself from Bush, declared that “we’re on the verge of chaos and the current plan is not working”.

The elections have coincided with the failure of a huge military drive to secure Baghdad — and 97 US deaths so far this month. The questions now facing the US are what goals it can still reasonably hold for influencing Iraq, and above all, how it can get its 144,000 troops home.

This week saw the spectacle of a policy splintering into incoherence as the Administration argued that it still had options, in the vanishing middle ground’ between “stay the course” and “cut and run”.

The White House said that it would no longer use “stay the course” to describe its goals, but Bush later said “the only way we lose is if we leave before the job is done”.

General George Casey, US commander of coalition forces, said that Iraqi forces might be ready to uphold security on their own in 12 to 18 months, but that he might need more US troops in the meantime.

As one official put it: “All our options, apart from just pulling out right now and forget the consequences, depend on the Iraqi security services coming good. And at that point, it becomes Operation Cross Fingers.”

Washington is half empty this week, with Congress out on the campaign trail. Administration staff have nothing but Iraq to divert them from bleak polls. Officials prefer, for privacy, to meet journalists in the anonymous snack bars that surround the White House and the Pentagon, where the air is thick with flavoured coffee and people eat with beige raincoats still belted.

One official drew out plans A, B and C on a paper plate, as if there is as generous a menu of military choices as there is for coffee. “There aren’t any good options”, another adviser said. “We’re America, and it feels like we have no options.”

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