The recent Security Council resolution might have given a veneer of legitimacy to the US actions in Iraq, but contrary to what Mr. Bush thinks, it is not an endorsement, but an exit strategy that the UN has offered to him. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush's affirmation of the US military's continued presence in Iraq betrays his utter failure to read between the lines.

It would, therefore, not be presumptuous to ask as to what, after all, is the job that Mr. Bush wants to get done in Iraq, and how long will it take to be completed? The question is a natural upshot of the constant shift in rationales and arguments used to justify US actions and continued presence in Iraq. Even after fourteen months of occupation, it is difficult to comprehend the central US argument for its presence in Iraq.

So variegated have been the shifts and so many reasons proffered during the run up to and after the occupation, that one could be forgiven for losing track of the matter. In fact, William Raspberry, writing in the Washington Post on May 30, 2004, quotes an Illinois high school researcher as turning up no fewer than twenty-three such 'rationales' that the Bush administration has offered from time to time for invading and occupying Iraq.

It will not come as a surprise to many to know that 9/11 had nothing to do with 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. According to many analysts, the planning for the invasion of Iraq predated the attack on the Twin Towers. The underlying motivations were quite different from the expressed intentions, which to most were mere excuses to attack Iraq.

As Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post recently said, one is hard put to rationalise how the acts of a terrorist group based in the distant hills of Afghanistan can prompt a country to occupy another which had, by the US administration's own admission, no hand in the Twin Towers attack.

Now that the Iraqi occupation has been legitimised through the latest Security Council resolution, it may be quite possible for the world to forget the main reasons for the US occupation of Iraq. One feels obliged to recall the expressed reasons of Messrs. Bush and Blair, if only to highlight the fact that, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with moral or national security compulsions.

First, it was Iraq's refusal to abide by UN resolutions that was touted as an excuse to invade Iraq. If the intention was to chastise errant UN members that were in breach of UN resolutions, the US was rather selective in its choice of targets, by conveniently forgetting that it was Israel that was, and still is, in violation of more than sixty UN resolutions since 1948.

Second, it was the WMDs that Iraq was supposed to be in possession of, access to which was denied to the UN inspectors. Intelligence was fabricated and doctored and information manufactured and exaggerated to motivate public opinion and the pliant press to prepare the grounds for US invasion of Iraq.

Suddenly too, the Coalition partners found a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, and reinvented another rationale for war, which was that Iraq was the central front in the war against terror, and that the Iraq operation would help arrest the growth of international terrorism.

Having occupied Iraq, but having failed to find WMDs (at one time there was reportedly a twelve hundred strong Defense Intelligence Agency team trundling around the Iraqi countryside), the liberation of Iraq and deliverance of the Iraqi people from Saddam became the raison d'être of the invasion.

The world is only too aware of the 'freedom' that the Iraqis are now enjoying and the Iraqis have been made painfully aware of the meaning of liberation and liberators.

According to Bush, the US military is doing a 'job' which they must complete before they can leave Iraq. And what have this 'job' achieved so far in Iraq, and what has it given the Iraqis and the world?

Two recently published reports have put paid to the US-British propaganda on Iraq and the so-called war on terror. Amnesty International has accused the US of transforming the world into a more dangerous place with continued erosion of human rights, and Fredric Gouin of the ICRC has characterised the war against terror as a "sexed up term, for media consumption which is, in legal terms, non-existent."

The International Institute of International Studies (IISS) is even more critical of the US 'war against terror'. It says that, instead of crippling, the U.S. actions have invigorated Al-Qaeda. The US actions in Afghanistan have galvanized the group rather than hurt it in any significant way. The attitude of the coalition has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Al Qaeda, and the US tactics in Iraq have engendered insurgency. Having been driven out from their base in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda has found refuge in many other countries, thus putting these countries at great risk. Its leadership has become more decentralised, with an invisible presence in more than sixty countries, the IISS report says.

If the current state of affairs in Iraq, militarily and politically, is an index of the 'success' of the 'job' that the US military is involved with, in Iraq, even the US policy planners in their hearts must concede defeat on both counts.

Except for regime change, an objective that was not initially articulated, the coalition has very little success to show in Iraq. NATO's reluctance to provide troops for Iraq indicates the allies' unwillingness to participate in a losing war. According to Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, it is the view in Paris and Moscow that Bush has failed to deliver on his promises regarding Iraq, and that the stated objectives are no longer attainable under Bush's policies.

It is no longer for the US to solve the Iraq imbroglio, for it itself is the cause of the imbroglio. It takes no Clausewitz to pronounce that Mr. Bush has all but lost his war in Iraq. He will willy-nilly lose the peace unless he sees the realities on the ground and allows those that can retrieve the situation to take charge, belated though it might be.

There is no 'job' that Bush needs to do in Iraq.

The author is Editor, Defence and Strategic Affairs, The Daily Star.