Embattled, Bush Held To Plan to Salvage Iraq

By early fall, even as Bush was on the campaign trail accusing Democrats of defeatism, he and his senior advisers were coming to the conclusion that his core assumptions were wrong. The political process would not lead to security in Iraq. In fact, it would have to be the other way around. And they started to doubt the advice from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior commanders in Baghdad that troop levels were adequate to contain the violence.

"It was pretty clear when you started to look at our assumptions, many of them just weren't right," said a senior administration official, who like others discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

Bush concluded by the run-up to the Nov. 7 congressional elections that to change course he would have to get rid of Rumsfeld, the senior figure in his administration most resistant to rethinking the Iraq strategy. At the same time, several agency reviews of Iraq policy were launched. But both decisions were kept secret until after the balloting.

In the meantime, Bush dispatched national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to Iraq to bring back what White House officials called "ground truth." Hadley returned from his Oct. 29 to Nov. 5 trip profoundly disturbed by the Maliki government, uncertain whether the prime minister was capable of doing what was necessary to rein in Shiite militias.

The day after the election, Bush announced that he was removing Rumsfeld and replacing him with former CIA director Robert M. Gates. That same day, Hadley sent a five-page classified memo to the president that proposed bolstering Maliki's political and security capacities and raised the prospect of more U.S. troops.

On Nov. 14, Bush ordered that the various agency reviews be combined into a single process and declared that he would lead it himself. A group led by deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch II began a series of grueling seven- and eight-hour-a-day meetings.

Closeted in a conference room named for World War II-era secretary of state Cordell Hull, the Iraq team debated papers presented by senior officials throughout the government. State Department officials urged a more energetic outreach to Iraqis beyond Baghdad's Green Zone, to hedge against failure by the Maliki government. Other officials, including those in the office of Vice President Cheney, voiced concern that U.S. steps to reach out to disaffected Sunni Iraqis had not brought about a corresponding decrease in violence.

The president also heard from outside experts. In an early December Oval Office meeting, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane presented his own plan for an increase of tens of thousands of U.S. troops to restore security in Baghdad. Another retired Army general, Barry R. McCaffrey, said he told Bush that the idea was a "fool's errand" and argued that putting more troops on the ground would not change the underlying dynamic. Still, the administration was interested enough in a buildup that Keane had follow-up sessions with Cheney and Hadley.

At the same time, White House officials called in scores of lawmakers to discuss Iraq with the president in the weeks leading up to Bush's Jan. 10 speech. While many Democrats dismissed such talks as a facade of consultation over a decision long since made, Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said when he told Hadley at a private meeting that the president needed to make clear that the U.S. commitment was not "open-ended," Hadley picked up the telephone and called an aide to make sure the speech included such language.

White House aides also debated how to respond to the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan, congressionally chartered commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III, a close friend of the president's father, and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (Ind.), a widely respected Democrat. At first, officials said, they hoped the group would prove a vehicle for bringing the two parties together after a bitter election.

But the panel advanced several key proposals that the White House quickly made clear were unacceptable to Bush, particularly a plan to withdraw U.S. combat forces by early 2008, open talks with Iraq's neighbors Iran and Syria, and condition U.S. assistance on the Maliki government meeting defined political benchmarks.

Rejecting Plan B

A version of Maliki's surprise proposal during the Amman meeting turned out to be the major alternative considered by Bush, White House officials said. The plan called for ringing Baghdad with U.S. troops while Iraqi security forces fought the sectarian violence in the city. Other U.S. troops in the country would shift to the borders to keep Iranian and Syrian infiltrators out, leaving U.S. forces with one main combat mission -- attacking al-Qaeda elements in Anbar province in western Iraq.