no surrender date...

...we tend to think of it as a very long engagement.

• The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials. ("The White House Scales Back Talk of Iraq Progress," By DAVID E. SANGER, April 28, 2007, Washington Post)

in other words, don't be looking for victory claims by the u.s. government; but they still claim anyone that doesn't follow them down the rabbit hole is holding up a white flag. the answer continues to be political and diplomatic talks that the eschew. the time for war is quickly drawing to a close. ask the army:

• After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations. ("A failure in generalship,"
  By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal, May 2007)

first the ISG and now the officers. if the u.s. does not start planning the endgame now, this will be even more a disaster for the iraqi people than it now is (picture, car bomb, karbala, 28 april 2007, AP Photo/Ghassan al-Yasiri).