Bush Looks for an Exit

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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."