Amid Hints Bush Will Change Policy, Clues That He Won't

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
December 4, 2006
Pg. 15
News Analysis

By David E. Sanger
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — The debate that will engulf Washington and much of the country this week centers on a question that lurks at the intersection of war strategy and the personality of the commander in chief: after three and a half years, is President Bush ready to abandon his declaration that American forces cannot begin to leave Iraq until the Iraqis demonstrate that they are capable of defending themselves?
As administration officials tried to prepare the ground over the weekend for the release of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s long-awaited report on Wednesday, the president’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, repeatedly sidestepped questions about how the administration would react to the panel’s recommendations.
On three television news programs on Sunday, he offered assurances that Mr. Bush would look at all the new ideas landing on his desk to develop what Mr. Hadley referred to — 12 times — as a “new way forward,” one that the president would announce to the nation in “weeks, not months.”
But Mr. Hadley knows that one of the commission’s core conclusions is that the White House should announce a plan for American forces to begin pulling back, whether the Iraqis are ready or not.
The commission’s proposal is carefully calibrated, officials familiar with it say, dangling the possibility that American troops would stay longer if the fragile Iraqi government actually takes on the militias and death squads. But without explicit resort to deadlines or timelines, it also threatens accelerated withdrawal if the government fails to act decisively.
Commission members say they concluded that Mr. Bush’s strategy so far has created an expectation that the United States will always be there to hold Iraq together. Breaking that culture of dependency, they concluded, is the key to making the long-discussed “Iraqification” of the country’s security a reality. But they are uncertain whether they can persuade a famously stubborn president to adopt that view.
“Is George Bush ready to hear that?” one commission member asked over the weekend. “I don’t think any of us really know. I don’t know if the president himself knows.”
The answer may depend on the impact of the bruising political realities of 2006 — and the prospect that Iraq could define Mr. Bush’s presidency as Vietnam defined Lyndon B. Johnson’s.
Mr. Bush, of course, has never lacked for certainty about his strategies for Iraq. From his early enthusiastic descriptions about building a model of democracy in the Middle East to his glossy “Victory in Iraq” strategy paper a year ago, Mr. Bush has not shown a hint of doubt in public that eventually his approach would succeed, or that his critics were wildly off course.
That has begun to change just days before the Iraq Study Group’s report, which includes a call for phased withdrawal of combat brigades from Iraq, starting next year and ending in 2008. Now Mr. Bush and his aides are suddenly trying to embrace uncertainty as a virtue — a sign of flexibility toward new ideas.
A flood of memos written by Mr. Bush’s top advisers — two of them leaked in recent days — offer a host of ideas, some of them internally inconsistent and some proposing actions dismissed by Mr. Bush just months ago as evidence of a lack of national resolve to win.
On Sunday, Mr. Hadley’s repetition of the wording “way forward” was no accident. Both the title of the Iraq Study Group’s report and the proposed name of the yet-undecided White House strategy are expected to make use of the same language, officials say.
Mr. Hadley portrayed Mr. Bush as “interested in getting a range of new ideas” for many months now — a period that covers the run-up to the midterm elections, when he and Vice President Dick Cheney charged that “phased withdrawal” and timelines were just euphemisms for retreat.
Perhaps so. But Mr. Bush himself told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on Friday that “this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it,” a statement that made some commission members wonder if the president was signaling that some of their ideas would be dead on arrival.
Mr. Hadley offered a different explanation on Sunday, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that after the first leaks of the Iraq Study Group’s conclusions, the president simply felt “he needed to stop” any talk that the commission, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, was going to provide “cover for an American withdrawal.”
“That’s cut and run and, of course, as the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea,” Mr. Hadley said.
But commission members say it is not tea they will be serving on Wednesday, but rather a more powerful brew, infused with the realities of a war on the brink of spinning beyond Washington’s control. They insist that their phased approach of incentives and disincentives to Mr. Maliki’s government amounts to a last-ditch effort to come up with a strategy with a prayer of working, and that if it was compressed onto a bumper sticker, it would boil down to “train and walk backward.”
Administration officials say Mr. Bush is likely to embrace that part of the report, which will call for vastly increasing the number of American trainers embedded in Iraqi units, along with other provisions that he can argue are already being implemented.
And while the White House will call for time to examine the rest of the report, officials say that Mr. Baker, who was secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father and is close to the current president, has kept Mr. Hadley and others apprised of the broad directions of the report.
“There’s been more than a little common shaping of concepts here, and I suspect you’ll hear that in some of the language used by all sides,” said one commission official working on the report.
The risk, commission members say, is that by the time the White House carries out its “new way forward,” it may be too late. Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of American forces in Iraq, drafted plans early this year to reduce the number of American combat brigades by a third by the end of this year. That has not happened; instead, the brigades are facing more danger than ever as they try to regain control of Baghdad.
Even Mr. Hadley seemed barely able to suppress his skepticism at Mr. Maliki’s vow, renewed last week, that Iraq’s military would be able to defend the government itself by the middle of 2007. “Our commanders have looked at that plan; they think it is ambitious,” he said.
 
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