As an army dies, its commander in chief swans

Whether the US withdraws from Iraq may soon become moot.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'

Not to put too fine a point on it, but members of a public affairs team have a specific set of marching orders. Public Affairs Specialists are there to tell the story of the unit from the unit point of view and to put things in a positive light. Negativity coming from the group which is intended to provide a firewall tells a story in itself.

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).

But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

In short, the US military ground force in Iraq and Afghanistan, is well beyond its limits of endurance.

In other recent news, George W Bush, Commander In Chief of the United States military, is looking forward to a bit of a rest. He'd like to go to France, if he could go mountain biking, but he's more than happy to go to Crawford, Texas.

"If people were asking me where I think they ought to vacation, it would be right here in America - where I'll be vacationing, as you know. Monday, starting in Crawford," Bush said.

Bush began his vacation on Thursday at his family's ocean-side estate. On Monday, he will continue on to his ranch in Crawford.

There are, after all, Presidential Daily Briefings to ignore.