David Sanger: Will Bush Change on Iraq?

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:

Published on Monday, December 4, 2006 by New York Times
Will Bush Change on Iraq?
by David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON - 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..........

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1204-01.htm