Giving Bush a safe path for a change of course

Some bipartisan commissions try to move public opinion on contentious national issues. Others try to help Congress find compromise solutions to thorny problems.

The Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), had a different, and unusual, goal: persuading President Bush to change his mind about staying the course in Iraq.

“This is highly unusual,” an advisor to the group said Wednesday after the panel released its report. “It’s one thing for people inside the administration to tell the president what to do. But for an outside group to say, ‘Here, son, let us give you a road map for your foreign policy,’ that’s remarkable.”

To try to make it easier for Bush -- a man who prides himself on consistency and who consequently is criticized by opponents as stubborn -- the 10-member commission delivered its report in two parts and two different tones.

The first part was an assessment of the situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating” -- tough language that Baker and his colleagues deliberately chose in order to break through the shield of defiant confidence that Bush often has deployed concerning the war.

“At least, after this report, Bush will now be prevented from painting a rosy picture,” said the advisor, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the commission.

The second part, by contrast, was a carefully calibrated list of relatively moderate recommendations for the future, many of which gave the president considerable leeway to choose specific policies.

For example, while the report recommended that the United States should seek to complete its military training mission in Iraq by the first quarter of 2008, it noted that it was echoing a date that U.S. military commanders already had projected. And it added that the timetable could be extended if there were “unexpected developments.”

It was part of a concerted effort by the commission to make it as comfortable as possible for Bush to adopt some version of its ideas, members said.

“We’re not here to vex or embarrass,” former Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) said as the panel presented its findings to Bush at the White House on Wednesday morning.

Baker gave Bush a preview of the report’s findings in a one-on-one lunch Tuesday, both to avoid blindsiding the president and to make a sales pitch for its recommendations.

Bush was courteous but noncommittal as he officially received the report.

“I told the members that this report ... will be taken very seriously by this administration,” Bush said. “This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq. It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion.”

Members of the commission said they were pleased that Bush gave them as much attention as he did, a full hour’s worth. “He could have scheduled us for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for the cameras,” said former Atty. Gen. Edwin M. Meese III.

But they acknowledged that the president did not endorse any of their findings.

Later in the day, White House spokesman Tony Snow pointed out some of the report’s most congenial passages to reporters. “There are no drop-dead dates” for withdrawing U.S. troops, he said, and noted that although the panel did not call for “victory” in Iraq, it did endorse another formula Bush has used to describe his goal: “An Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.”

Baker and other members of the commission said they hoped that Congress and the public would take up their recommendations and, they implied, join in putting pressure on Bush to move in their direction.

Baker and Hamilton plan to give speeches around the country and to testify before Congress next year to reinforce their message, aides said.

“Presidents have been known to change their minds. He’s been known to change his,” Baker, who served as a top aide to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said in an interview with ABC News. “It may be that you will see some mind-changing, but you may not.”

Last month’s congressional election -- in which war-weary voters gave the House and Senate to the Democrats -- was a wake-up call for Bush, several members said.

“I think he recognized that he has to look at things and react,” said Meese, a conservative Republican who also served under Reagan.

In recent weeks, however, Bush has sounded distinctly unfriendly to calls that he change course. He objected preemptively to some of the commission’s reported recommendations, saying he opposed unconditional talks with Iran and was not seeking “a graceful exit” from Iraq.

At the same time, though, his administration launched three policy reviews of its own -- in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House -- partly to avoid the impression that he was waiting passively for Baker and Hamilton to tell him what to do.

Those reviews may be complete by the end of the year and could give the president a face-saving way to change course without appearing to bend to outside advisors.

Officials said Bush was likely to adopt some of the panel’s findings that were close to his own policies -- such as shifting U.S. troops to advisory roles -- but at a pace the Pentagon proposed, which might be slower.

As for talks with Iran and Syria, the president will probably say that it is up to the government of Iraq, not him. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has called for an international support group that would include Iran and Syria.

White House spokesman Snow said that although Bush had ruled out “one-on-one talks with Iran,” U.S. contact with Iran within a multinational support group might be worth considering. “I don’t want to rule [it] out entirely,” he said.

But a former administration official said Vice President Dick Cheney remained implacably opposed to talks with Iran -- and told Baker that bluntly this year.

But “Cheney may not have as many allies as before,” said the advisor to the commission. He noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, another hawk, is about to be replaced by Robert M. Gates, a former member of the Baker-Hamilton panel who agrees with its call for talks with Iran.

Several aides to the commission said the report’s timing appeared fortuitous, coming on the heels of the November election and Rumsfeld’s departure.

That was partly because Baker insisted on delaying the release of the report until after the election to prevent Democrats from using its critical passages as campaign talking points.

If that happened, Baker judged, Bush would be unlikely to take the commission’s recommendations seriously.

That decision was controversial on the panel. At one point, several people said, former Defense Secretary William J. Perry asked: “If we were meeting in the spring of 1860 to stave off the Civil War, would we be waiting for a whole year?”

But Baker prevailed.

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doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com