Second Life for Study Group

Although the panel's 10 prominent Americans, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, did not call for a timetable of withdrawal, they said they believed combat brigades could be withdrawn by early 2008. Members also said they could live with Bush's "surge" plan but made it clear that they saw that as only a short-term solution.

The president spoke graciously about the study when it was first released, but the report enraged some conservatives inside and outside the administration as a recipe for defeat. Many officials involved with the study think the president was not happy with being given a blueprint for Iraq policy from a group of outsiders, let alone one led by his father's former close aide Baker.

Since then, however, the White House has appeared to be inching toward concepts in the report, most notably its more active diplomacy in the Middle East. Although the effort is clearly less than the full diplomatic "offensive" that was recommended, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has since traveled to the Middle East trying to restart the peace process, met for the first time with Syria's foreign minister and has been more assertive in trying to engage Iraq's neighbors, including Iran, to help quell the nation's sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, the idea of political benchmarks for the Iraqi government is emerging as a major point of discussion as the White House and congressional Democrats try to sort out their differences over funding the war. Borrowing from dates suggested by the Iraqi government itself, the Iraq Study Group laid out a series of milestones for political progress, such as passing a law to distribute oil revenues, holding provincial elections and allowing former Baathists back into the government.

The panel said American support for Iraq should be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting the benchmarks. The White House has resisted such conditions in the past, but aides say the president is now willing to negotiate such a plan in the new Iraq funding bill.

"Any kind of reasonable benchmarks on the Iraqi government, I think, are going to have broad bipartisan support," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a strong Bush ally, said yesterday on ABC's "This Week." On the same show, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated that the kind of "accountability" the administration wants is insufficient.

"The administration is sort of being slowly compelled to adopt the bipartisan consensus that the Iraq Study Group presented them in December," said James F. Dobbins, a Rand Corp. analyst and former U.S. diplomat who served on one of the expert working groups advising the panel. "Eventually they are going to be pulled to it regarding troop reductions."

The trouble, he said, is that by coming around so late, the White House may have missed the last opportunity to rally Congress to support staying in Iraq under more limited circumstances -- rather than simply pulling out. "They are going to end up embracing all the provisions, without the benefit of bipartisanship," Dobbins said.