Can Bush Find an Exit?

(2 of 2)
To bring Bush aboard, Solomon, Hamre and Abshire approached the one person in Bushland who still had a reputation for realism and who could command the President's ear, alone: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Would she propose the commission to the President? After some hesitation, Rice agreed, but she made one request: the commission had to look forward, not backward, in part because she knew the dysfunctional Bush foreign policy operation, tilted as it was so heavily along the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, would not permit, much less sustain, scrutiny. As the trio departed, a Rice aide asked one of her suitors not to inform anyone at the Pentagon that chairmen had been chosen and the study group was moving forward. If Rumsfeld was alerted to the study group's potential impact, the aide said, he would quickly tell Cheney, who could, with a few words, scuttle the whole thing. Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, the President agreed.

After rejecting every name that Solomon & Co. proposed, Baker and Hamilton were left to choose their own panelists, and the commission went to work, gathering evidence, making a trip to Baghdad and hearing from more than 100 experts. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor developed a reputation for asking the best questions. Democratic power broker Vernon Jordan emerged as the group's political sage. Former Bill Clinton Defense chief William Perry cornered the military options—and would be a holdout on the final deal. In October, as the number of casualties in Iraq exploded, public support for Bush dropped through the floor. When Democrats swept the November elections, aides to several panelists told Time that the commission would have more room to make sweeping proposals. Rumsfeld's resignation the next day cemented that feeling—which is not to say the commission thought it had any perfect solutions. "We did not think there were any good options on Iraq," one of the experts told Time. "What we're really looking at are less-bad options."

But instead of making things easier, the elections actually made them harder. After Bush replaced Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission who had served the first President Bush as head of the CIA, the psychoanalysis rampant in the media about Daddy's team coming back to save the prodigal son steamed everyone at the White House, from the President on down, and led the Administration to dig in its heels. Says a Baker confidant: "Everything that happened on Election Day made for extra work." It wasn't long before senior Administration officials were whispering that the diplomatic proposals coming out of Baker's shop would never fly. Realizing that with Gates moving to the Pentagon, the study group's report may have more impact than they had first thought, Democrats from all quarters began bombarding their allies on the panel with advice about how to stage an organized withdrawal and pressing for a precise drawdown timetable. Baker, who was in touch with the White House, resisted.

Meanwhile, Iraq kept deteriorating, and there was a risk that the panel's proposals would be obsolete before consensus was reached. "It overshadowed everything," says an aide to one member. "They were constantly dealing with new developments over there." Baker turned up last Monday with a draft report he wanted panel members to consider or amend and then get into the President's hands. Democrats led by Hamilton, Perry and Leon Panetta, Clinton's ex-chief of staff, were adamant that the report recommend a firm starting point for troop withdrawals. When the Republicans again refused, members agreed on language that would leave the date vague but the vector clear. And then the group adjourned.

The Endgame

The hot word in Washington these days is bandwidth, as in, Does this Administration have the bandwidth to solve all these problems? Even those who back the Baker plan worry about whether there is anyone inside the Administration who can carry it out. There is widespread doubt that the Bush team is emotionally or ideologically able to execute a plan that is so at odds with its collective instincts and that many of its supporters might resist. Of particular concern to members of the study group is the state of the U.S. State Department. Although Rice has restored some of the department's lost influence since replacing Colin Powell, she is currently working without a deputy and has had trouble filling that post. Her top lawyer, Philip Zelikow, is leaving soon, and there is a wide variety of people who wonder whether she—or anyone else—could amass the clout to take on both the Middle East and Iraq security talks in the time that is left to this Administration. That's one reason there are growing calls for a special envoy to the region who can hold all the reins in one hand. Some have even suggested that Bush try to persuade Baker to stay on and take up one last mission for his country. Bush will put a few weeks between the big Baker-Hamilton rollout and his own restart. White House officials worry that anything faster would look too reactive—a curious instinct, given the public's overwhelming desire for change and the positive response Bush received when he tossed Rumsfeld over the side after the elections. Says a former government official who has known Bush for 20 years: "If he is going to take political advantage of things he might have done anyhow, why not do them fast instead of slow?" It may be that the President is not yet ready to answer the obvious question when the strategy changes: What is the new definition of success? Bush himself teed that up when he told reporters in October, "You all got to understand, and the parents of our troops must understand, that if I didn't believe we could succeed and didn't believe it was necessary for the security of this country to succeed, I wouldn't have your loved ones there."

But the White House won't wait for the Baker-Hamilton road show to signal that it is changing course. A White House official told Time over the weekend that the new path the President will outline in coming weeks is "significantly different than what we've been doing. When the President says we're going to get the job done, that doesn't suggest it is an open-ended commitment forever." The inevitability of serious change, it emerges, had become clear even to one so dug in as Rumsfeld. The New York Times reported last week that two days before he was ousted, the Defense Secretary submitted a memo to the White House saying the Iraq strategy was failing and calling for "major adjustment," including possible troop pullbacks.

To seize the initiative, the White House announced a series of new diplomatic actions of its own, inviting Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq's leading Shi'ite party, and Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni Vice President, to Washington over the next few weeks as part of an effort to deepen connections to a greater variety of Iraqi political figures. And aides say Bush may call for what were already being dubbed "reciprocal obligations" with the Iraqi government: trading troop deployments for progress on sectarian violence, just as Baker and Hamilton are expected to propose. But there will be no ultimatums. A senior Administration official says, "Bush's plan is eventually going to call for reductions in troops. They're going to do whatever they can to get the security to a level at which it's sustainable so that at some point they can start to draw down the troop levels."

And that points to the biggest weaknesses in any rescue plan. Whether it is the Baker approach or whatever the White House decides to call its own, events in Iraq could easily make any plan for diplomacy and withdrawal irrelevant in the face of a weak central government, a deepening civil war and widespread violence. A commission official put it this way: "What we have produced is a plan for December. We have no idea what things are going to look like in February."

—With reporting by Mike Allen, Massimo Calabresi, Sally B. Donnelly, Elaine Shannon, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/ Washington and Aparisim Ghosh/ Baghdad