Searching for an Iraq Exit Strategy

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Getting out of Iraq will require the sort of hard choices between interests and ideals that the Bush Administration has been historically reluctant to make. The Baker group is considering a series of proposals that will include calling for intensive regional diplomacy, such as direct, high-level talks with Iran and Syria--something the Bush team has resisted for months. Most significant, the commission plans to outline a plan for redeploying--that is to say, pulling out--some U.S. troops over the next year. The group is also considering telling the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad that U.S. troops will stay and help steady the country only if the government puts an end to sectarian violence. If the killings continue, the U.S. will pull out quickly. "If these things don't happen," said Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, "we're going to have to move out faster."

Baker has been talking to the President directly for months. The two men have a long history. It was Bush who installed himself in Washington in 1986 to keep an eye on his father's presidential campaign, then being run by Baker. And it was Baker who led the legal fight in Florida that handed W. his presidency in 2001. But if Baker is now laying the groundwork for another bailout of the man he once referred to as Junior, he can also thank Bush for bringing him back to center stage at a time of genuine national crisis. Baker has held three Cabinet posts, overseen a fourth agency and run five presidential campaigns. Untying the Gordian knot that is Iraq would cement his reputation as one of the nation's premier wise men of the past 30 years.

It is tantalizing to imagine that Baker, who plans to issue his report next month, pushed Bush to dump Rumsfeld for Gates. A former Baker aide last week called the coincidence of timing "painfully obvious" and noted the appointment of Gates to the Baker commission last year. There is also the fact that Rumsfeld has long been resented by many Bush 41 loyalists, who recall the way Rumsfeld schemed to get Bush appointed director of the CIA in 1976 to prevent him from becoming Gerald Ford's running mate that year. But there were more pressing reasons for Rumsfeld to go--and quickly. "Baker wasn't going to let his report come out," says a Gates aide, "so that Rummy could stomp all over it." As for Bush 41, he is staying above the nitty-gritty of the takeover, says one of 41's former aides, but "he's definitely in the loop."

It will fall to Gates to execute the Baker plan. Bush first approached Gates about joining his team more than a year ago, when he was looking for a new director of national intelligence. As a former CIA director, Gates found the offer tempting but declined after he decided that the job amounted to little more than overseeing a vast bureaucracy rather than running a real intelligence operation. Bush didn't offer the Pentagon job to Gates until early last week. A little cloak-and-dagger was used to sneak Gates onto the President's ranch for his job interview: he was instructed to meet White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and his deputy, Joe Hagin, at a supermarket parking lot in nearby McGregor, Texas, for the drive to Crawford. The President slipped out to meet Gates at the new office that opened on the ranch in 2004.