Arshad Mohammed and Susan Cornwell
Reuters
Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Despite a tepid embrace from the White House, the Iraq Study Group's recommendations will help shape President George W. Bush's new policy if only because of their popular support, analysts said on Wednesday.

While saying he will take the report "very seriously," Bush has all but rejected its appeal to engage Iran and Syria directly over Iraq and has been cool to the idea of withdrawing many U.S. troops from combat by early 2008 if possible.

Bush has not ruled out the group's proposal to organize a regional support group for Iraq but he has made clear he will not be bound by the 10-member panel's recommendations and has commissioned his own internal review of U.S. Iraq policy.

Analysts said the White House was, understandably, trying to put some distance between itself and the panel led by Republican former Secretary of State James Baker and Democrat former Rep. Lee Hamilton to preserve Bush's options.

But they said the report's resonance with the public -- which ended Republican control of both houses of Congress last month largely because of dissatisfaction with the Iraq war -- made it impossible for the Republican president to ignore.

A Washington Post ABC News poll released on Tuesday showed that 79 percent of Americans supported its recommendation of changing the primary mission of U.S. forces to supporting and training the Iraqi army from directly fighting insurgents.

The poll, which was conducted December 7-11 among a national sample of 1,005 adults, found 69 percent backed withdrawing almost all U.S. combat forces by early 2008 and 57 percent favored direct U.S. talks with Iran about Iraq.

"The president clearly doesn't want to look like he is a prisoner of any particular group," said James Dobbins, director of the Rand Corporation's international security and defense policy center. "He is trying to give himself some room so that when he finally comes to conclusions it won't look like he is being dictated to by his father's secretary of state."

"GOING TO BE SOME CHANGES"

Dobbins, noting the U.S. government typically denies it will change policy up to the moment it shifts course, said he did not take too seriously the Bush administration's resistance to some of the panel's idea.

"There are clearly going to be some changes, elements of this (report) are likely to be embraced. To the extent they are not embraced they are going to be under continued pressure to embrace them because the vast bulk of the American people have come to the conclusion that the recommendations of this report are the way their government ought to be going."

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, also rejected suggestions the report has been "orphaned" in Washington.

"It seems to me the orphan has become the baseline for all future discussion on Iraq," Alternman said. "The politics have shifted such that the president can't ignore ... public opinion."

The political pressure on Bush to change course in Iraq and, eventually, to find a way out for the roughly 134,000 U.S. troops there was demonstrated in the November 7 election that gave control of Congress to Democrats.

Key lawmakers welcomed the report as being similar to a Democratic-sponsored Senate resolution to move toward a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and liked the fact that it put pressure on Bush to change course.

But Democratic praise was short of overwhelming, and some Democratic aides acknowledged that there were members of the party who wished the report had gone even further.

Among other things, some Democrats are pushing for a harder timeline on when to remove U.S. forces.

"Most of us realize the war has been a disaster, and the question now is not so much will we leave, but how and when do we leave," Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters.

Asked about the report's failure to set a deadline, he said: "I don't think that is realistic. I think events have so overtaken us, it is so obvious in a civil war, I think that there will be a timetable."

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