No Big Shifts Planned After Report on Iraq

Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said by e-mail: "Further pursuit of the administration's flawed escalation strategy is not in our nation's best interests. Every day that we continue to stick to the president's flawed strategy is a day that America is not as secure as it could be."

The official White House position is that no decisions will be made by the president until after he hears from Petraeus and Crocker, as well as from other top advisers and lawmakers. But there seems little doubt that the White House will argue that the current military strategy has enjoyed some success. Pointing to this week's National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, one White House official said that "it's a different situation than we faced a year ago," when security seemed to be collapsing throughout Baghdad.

But the estimate also expressed little hope for a political accommodation among Iraq's feuding leaders, and officials acknowledge that the Iraqi government is likely to miss many of the benchmarks for political progress set by Congress. That's why White House officials plan to contend that that some of the goals behind the benchmarks are being met in spirit: They noted that Iraq's oil revenue is effectively being shared throughout Iraq's 18 provinces, even in Sunni areas, even though the parliament has not passed a law on that distribution -- a key benchmark.

"The shelf life of a benchmark is pretty questionable," said one official. "They're probably not the benchmarks that even observers outside the administration would pick today."

Several outside analysts close to the administration said they expect Bush to respond to the reports from Petraeus and Crocker by offering some hints of how the U.S. strategy might evolve over the next year -- even if he does not move to change course in the short term -- in an effort to keep the bottom from falling out of the administration's remaining support in Congress.

"The reports themselves are reasonably predictable. I don't think there are likely to be significant new revelations about conditions in Iraq," said Philip D. Zelikow, a former State Department aide who was involved in Iraq policy. "The question for the administration coming up is: What is the credible strategy for a sustainable U.S. posture in Iraq extending through 2008 and beyond?"

Staff writers Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.