From Hundreds Of Sources, Panel Forged Consensus

By summer, the expert advisers had developed the first options paper centered on different goals. The experts originally explored four options: "Victory in Iraq," "Defeat Al Qaeda and Stabilize Baghdad," "Make Peace Work" and "Redeploy and Contain," as they were called in a July memo. The first and third were quickly discarded. The last two pitted a more limited military mission against a phased withdrawal over nine to 12 months.

The turning point came in September, when seven of the 10 members traveled to Baghdad aboard a C-130 military transport, decked out in bulletproof vests and helmets as the plane corkscrewed to a landing to avoid enemy rockets. They then flew aboard Black Hawk helicopters to the Green Zone as other choppers fired flares to draw off any heat-seeking missiles.

The four days there made a powerful impression on the panel members, most of whom knew nothing more about Iraq than what they had seen on television and read in the newspapers. "I'll never forget the helicopters coming in at night delivering wounded to the hospital in the Green Zone," recalled member Leon E. Panetta, who was Clinton's White House chief of staff. "We've all seen 'MASH,' and yet it was happening right there."

Explosions outside the Green Zone rattled the guesthouse and trailers where they slept. "You knew somewhere either a car bomb has gone off or something has happened," Panetta said. "And then in the morning, you could sometimes see the smoke."

Only one member, former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), a retired Marine, left the Green Zone, venturing out to look at the impact of the operation intended to secure Baghdad. By the time they returned home, many of the commissioners had concluded that the war was going worse than they had realized. One internal working paper said that 30,000 to 40,000 Iraqis have been dying each year since the 2003 invasion.

The trip "altered their thinking," said Paul Hughes, a commission aide who had served in Iraq and escorted the members on their trip. "Every one of them came out and said there is no immediate exit. There is no way America could turn and walk away from Iraq."

Referring to the insistence of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) on a prompt withdrawal, Hughes said that "the Murtha cut-and-run option was a non-starter."

Robb was especially interested in sending more U.S. forces, according to one participant, and the panel considered proposals to deploy 100,000 to 200,000 additional troops. Ultimately, though, the panel discovered that there might be only 20,000 available, prompting vigorous discussion that led members to conclude that a substantial surge was unworkable.

"By September, you did not hear anyone supporting the idea of victory or more troops very much," said Marina S. Ottaway, a working-group member from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "There had been a lot of pretending for a while, but that ended in the fall."

Yet many were slow to support even a phased withdrawal. In a straw poll in September, only two of the commission's 44 advisers favored the idea. Over the next eight weeks, as casualties mounted, support for withdrawal grew exponentially. In e-mails, Wayne White, a former Middle East intelligence analyst, implored holdouts to accept that the United States had badly damaged whole swaths of Iraq and had lost Anbar province to al-Qaeda.

"It sounds great to pump one's chest and declare that we cannot abandon Anbar and such areas to these elements," he wrote. "But . . . can anyone offer a refreshing, new and promising military strategy for beating them soundly with our already-overstretched forces in Iraq, Iraq's woeful police and disappointing army?"

In the last straw vote, on Nov. 3, half of the 44 advisers supported withdrawal.

By then, with the midterm elections upon them, commissioners had cut out the advisers and were talking only among themselves. Baker's tour on behalf of a book he had written raised the panel's public profile, and leaks about the deliberations heightened expectations about the coming report.

The 10 members gathered in Washington on Nov. 27 to begin final deliberations. Baker thought that a major troop withdrawal should happen by the 2008 elections and that it would take six months to complete, according to insiders. But he opposed the specific timetable Perry advanced. Panetta helped resolve the disagreement by suggesting that they adopt a date put forward by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Iraq commander, who had just proposed finishing training and equipping Iraqi forces by the first quarter of 2008.

Every line in the 96-page report was carefully debated, and all members agreed in the end. "When we struck consensus, there was a real sense of relief," said former U.S. diplomat Edward P. Djerejian, who co-wrote the drafts with fellow adviser Christopher A. Kojm. "People started cracking jokes."

Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a Clinton confidant who served on the panel and hosted all the other members at his Washington house Tuesday night for a celebratory dinner of crab cakes, beef and souffle, said the debate was the kind Washington used to have. "Nobody was storming out of the room, nobody was screaming at anybody," he said. "What I have seen over the years is civility taking a back seat and giving way to hostility. . . . The good of this report is that civility has been rediscovered."