Can Bush Find an Exit?

George Bush has a history of long-overdue u-turns. He waited until he woke up, hungover, one morning at age 40 before giving up booze cold. He fought the idea of a homeland-security agency for eight months after 9/11 and then scampered aboard and called it his idea. He dumped Donald Rumsfeld last month as Defense Secretary, although lawmakers and even some generals had been calling for his head since 2005. Bush's biggest reversals usually come after months—even years—of stubborn resistance, when just about everyone has given up on his having any second thoughts at all. That's always been the point: he's a decider, he says, and deciders aren't supposed to undecide. When he does have to Kojak the car and head down the street in the opposite direction, he takes a little extra time getting it done.

But Bush has never had to pull off a U-turn like the one he is contemplating now: to give up on his dream of turning Babylon into an oasis of freedom and democracy and instead begin a staged withdrawal from Iraq, rewrite the mission of the 150,000 U.S. troops there as they begin to draw down, and launch a diplomatic Olympics across the Middle East and between Israel and the Palestinians. Even calling all that a reversal is a misnomer; it would be more like a personality transplant.

So it may take the 43rd President a little more time than it normally does to execute this particular U-turn. And he will do all he can to make it look more like a lane change. But sometime in the next month or so, Bush will begin the biggest foreign policy course correction of his presidency. No matter what else may get stapled onto it, the maneuver will be based on the agreement reached by the bipartisan commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton. Bush aides said last week that there is already agreement on the name for the restart: A New Way Forward, which borrows from the commission's own title, The Way Forward—New Approach. Among people who have known Bush for decades, there is almost as much certainty that he needs to disengage from Iraq as there are doubts about whether he has the wiring and instincts—much less the desire—to pull it off. "He is not stupid," says a commission source. "But he is stubborn. And he is very dug in. It takes a big person to find a way to walk back from some of this and embrace reality."

The President is about to get a lot of reality therapy. The Baker-Hamilton commission's work has been compared to a family intervention for a substance-addicted cousin, but unlike those encounters, this one won't remain behind closed doors. The entire 10-person commission will brief the President this Wednesday and then repeat the lesson for congressional leaders, both incoming and outgoing, later the same day. What happens next is designed to be even more convincing: several days of nonstop interviews on every media outlet, network and cable-TV station—a media blitz that will run well into the Sunday-morning news programs.

Of course some people don't like being rescued, and there is little reason to think that Bush or anyone around him is going to enjoy the visit by the Baker-Hamilton emergency squad. While there will be no lights flashing or sirens wailing, the commission is proposing nothing short of a repudiation of pretty much all U.S. foreign policy for the past three years. The Iraq Study Group will call for a massive diplomatic push in two areas in which the White House has never put its shoulder to the grindstone: rekindling peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis and holding an international conference that would lead to direct talks between Washington and both Tehran and Damascus. The commission agreed that the political turmoil inside Iraq could only be sorted out with the cooperation of neighboring countries, particularly Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have the strongest ties to the Shi'ite and Sunni groups propelling Iraq ever deeper into civil war.

The study group's military proposals are performance based: they would link a staged withdrawal from Iraq by U.S. forces to stronger actions by the struggling Iraqi government. The report does not set a timetable for troop reductions, but it is expected to offer Baghdad a slower withdrawal if the government takes steps to end the violence. If Baghdad cannot make that happen, the troops would depart at an even faster rate. The genius of the approach is that if security returns as a consequence of this squeeze play, the need for U.S. troops will presumably also decrease. Says an expert who briefed the panel on the idea of trading troops for cooperation: "Unless we use our withdrawal as leverage against reduced violence, anything we do will be drained away in the sands of an ineffective central government." That is why, either way, the report envisions, but stops short of stating flatly, that troop withdrawals should begin sometime next year.

These proposals will push Bush's buttons because they come from outsiders. Vice President Dick Cheney in particular has long resisted outside interference in foreign policy. But last week it was internal interference that upended the Administration's best-laid plans. Bush had no sooner arrived in Amman, Jordan, for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki than the New York Times published the full text of a memo to Bush from his National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley portraying al-Maliki as isolated, powerless and out of touch with the realities of his country and unable to affect them.

This is hardly surprising for a man who can barely leave his home without American logistical support, but the leaked memo from somewhere in the Bush Administration sank the President's plans for a take-charge summit. Al-Maliki abruptly canceled his planned meeting with Bush—a snub for which there is no well-known precedent—and waited until the following morning to have breakfast and a shortened, 45-min. session with him. There was little chemistry in that encounter; by all accounts al-Maliki looked sour and lost. During a short photo break, al-Maliki refused to look at Bush, and the President had to initiate a handshake between them. Ignoring the previous day's discourtesy, Bush declared al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq," a thumbs-up that did nothing for the Prime Minister's credibility at home, where an endorsement from the U.S. President may be the kiss of death. Bush then offered his first official reaction to the Baker-Hamilton proposals. "There's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq. We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done, so long as the government wants us there. This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all."

Inside the Commission

Realism was exactly what the people who cooked up the commission had in mind when they set the bipartisan operation in motion more than a year ago. The review began as an earmark—a $1 million insertion into an appropriations bill by Republican Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, who had gone to Iraq last year and decided U.S. policy wasn't working or, as he put it, needed "fresh eyes." He slotted the money to the U.S. Institute of Peace, whose president, Richard Solomon, joined two ceos Wolf trusted to organize the study: David Abshire, of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and John Hamre, who runs the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Those three settled on Baker and Hamilton as chairmen. Hamilton agreed, but Baker wanted Bush's blessing—and he wanted to let Bush know he might not like the outcome.

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