WASHINGTON – The bipartisan Iraq Study Group plans to recommend to President Bush that he threaten to reduce economic and military support for Iraq’s government if it fails to meet specific benchmarks intended to improve security in the country, a source familiar with the report said Tuesday.
The congressionally chartered panel, which is due to deliver its much-anticipated report to Bush at the White House this morning and then unveil it to the public, outlined diplomatic and military ideas intended to change the course of the 44-month-old war. Among other things, the source said, the report urges Bush to aggressively tackle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to reduce broader regional tensions fueling the Iraq conflict.
The latest details to emerge from the commission’s report help flesh out a plan that also calls for the United States to withdraw nearly all combat units by early 2008 while leaving behind tens of thousands of troops to advise, train and embed with Iraqi forces. The report also suggests that the Bush administration open talks with Iran and Syria about ways to end the violence in Iraq and proposes holding a regional conference to bring together all of Iraq’s neighbors.
Some proposals in the report track measures that the administration is already using or is considering, but several directly challenge Bush in areas in which he has refused to compromise. The president has rejected talking with Iran and Syria and has resisted linking the Iraq war to the Palestinian issue. He has dismissed timetables for troop withdrawals, although the panel cites 2008 as a goal rather than a firm deadline. He also has declined to punish Iraqis for not making progress in establishing security.
Although the study group will present its plan as a much-needed course change in Iraq, many of its own advisers concluded during its deliberations that the war is essentially already lost, according to private correspondence obtained Tuesday and interviews with participants. The best the commission could put forward would be the “least bad” of many bad options, as former ambassador Daniel Kurtzer wrote.
In private e-mail exchanges over the past two weeks, members of the commission’s working group, including former ambassadors, military officers and CIA analysts, expressed equally bleak outlooks for Iraq and skepticism that Bush would accept the panel’s recommendations.
The report offers initiatives and conclusions, including a long diplomatic section, a security section and the proposed benchmarks for Iraqi leaders. Former secretary of state James Baker, who served under President George H.W. Bush and co-chaired the commission, briefed President Bush on its conclusions over lunch Tuesday.
Baker and his co-chairman, former congressman Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., and the rest of the 10-member panel will meet with Bush at the White House at 10 a.m. PST today to formally hand over the report, then travel to Capitol Hill for a 2 p.m. news conference.
Much of the report emphasizes diplomatic options.
Clifford May, one of the working group’s advisers and a former Republican Party spokesman, was one of two advisers who opposed withdrawal and supported Bush’s strategy, but still said he “was willing to concede from the start that what Bush hoped for is probably not achievable. But it doesn’t mean that nothing is achievable.”
May said the report includes “at least 70 recommendations,” but a timetable for troop withdrawal is not among them. “Instead, it says we have a mission that can be accomplished and it defines that mission as the need to leave behind a government that can sustain itself,” May said.
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