Bush Begins Round of Talks on Iraq

New York Times
December 11, 2006

By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 — President Bush traveled to the State Department today as part of a round of consultations over how to reshape Iraq policy, saying that it was important that “when I do speak to the American people, they will know that I have listened to all aspects of government.”

He was scheduled to meet this afternoon with five experts in military and foreign affairs, four of whom have expressed deep skepticism about the recommendations issued last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. On Tuesday, he will consult by video link with commanders in Iraq and the U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

The president will then travel to the Pentagon on Wednesday for talks with top officials there.

Under intense pressure to change course, following his party’s losses in the Nov. 7 election and the assessment by the study group that the situation in Iraq is “grave and deteriorating,” President Bush hopes to deliver a major speech on Iraq before Christmas, according to the White House.

In brief remarks today at the State Department, as he stood flanked by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, the president gave little clue to his thinking but again underscored a long-term U.S. commitment to a successful outcome in Iraq.

Success there, he said, “is a country that governs, defends itself, that is a free society, that serves as an ally in this war on terror,” Mr. Bush said, adding that, “Iraq is a central component of defeating the extremists who want to establish safe haven in the Middle East.”

Stopping those who, he said, seek to aggressively spread a totalitarian ideology “is really the calling of our time.”

Mr. Bush has distanced himself from two key recommendations by the study group, the withdrawal from Iraq of most combat units by early 2008, and a new diplomatic effort to engage Iraq’s neighbors, including holding talks with Iran and Syria.

The president did not mention either of those issues today, though he did speak of the “responsibilities” that Iraq’s neighbors have “to help this young Iraqi democracy survive.”

And in an apparent reference to recent diplomatic initiatives by Baghdad toward the governments in Damascus and Tehran, Mr. Bush said, “I appreciate so very much the Iraqi leadership taking the lead in its neighborhood.”

The president took no questions.

Later today, Mr. Bush is scheduled to meet with Jack Keane, who was acting chief of staff for the Army and served on the study group’s panel of military advisers; Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former professor at the U.S. Army War College; Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general; Eliot Cohen, a military historian with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Strategic and Advanced International Studies; and Wayne Downing Jr., the retired former commander of the Special Operations Command and a White House counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Bush’s first term.

All but Mr. Downing are on record as having criticized parts of the study group’s report, some in particularly sharp terms.

Mr. Keane, for example, said that the goal set out by the Iraq Study Group of withdrawing most combat forces from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008 was impractical.

”Based on where we are now, we can’t get there,” Keane said in an interview last week with The New York Times. The report’s conclusions, he said, say more about ”the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”

General McCaffrey told The Times that while he agreed with the overall concept of withdrawing U.S. forces as the Iraqi military capability improved, the withdrawal of U.S. combat brigades could leave thousands of American advisers dangerously exposed. ”This is a recipe for national humiliation,” he said.

Mr. Biddle offered a similar assessment. He told The Los Angeles Times that the panel’s recommendation of embedding more U.S. troops with Iraqi units could be particularly dangerous without the backing of American combat brigades nearby.

“The U.S. combat brigades are currently keeping a lid on the violence in the country,” Mr. Biddle said. Without the combat units, he predicted, the use of roadside bombs by insurgents “will skyrocket, the civilian death rate will increase.”

For his part, Mr. Cohen was dismissive of both the study group’s process and its results.

“There is something of a farce in all this, an invocation of wisdom from a cohesive Washington elite that does not exist,” he wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

On Sunday, he told an NBC interviewer, “You had a bunch of very senior, eminent people all very worthy, who spent a grand total of four days in Iraq. Only one of them left the Green Zone.”

Of the report itself, he said: “Some parts of this verge on fantasy. You know, you’re going to get the Syrians to turn themselves in over the Hariri assassination; you’ll get them to persuade Hamas to recognize Israel.”

He referred to the assassination in February 2005 in Lebanon of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri. United Nations investigations have implicated Syrian officials in the killing.

“The idea that you’re going to have a different course of action” in Iraq, Mr. Cohen said, “I don’t really buy, at the end of the day.”

The White House has said that the study group report will be only “one input” in the administration’s broad reconsideration of Iraq policy. In addition to separate State Department and Defense Department reviews, the National Security Council has also been examining policy options.