Bush Tells a Tale

"At one point, as Mr. Bush, [national security adviser Steven] Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the newly appointed secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, weighed their options, the president asked his deputies, in effect: 'Why can't we just pull out of Baghdad and let the factions fight it out themselves?'"

What happened to change Bush's mind? The Times reports: "In the end, the official said, Mr. Hadley's teams concluded that an American withdrawal from Baghdad would 'crater the government.'"

I have my own guess: Cheney happened.

As the Times notes: "According to a senior administration official, Vice President Dick Cheney was among those who wanted a bigger force."

And in the other Times story, John F. Burns and Sabrina Tavernise contradict the Baghdad portion of Bush's psuedo-narrative:

"While senior officials in Washington have presented the new war plan as an American adaptation of proposals that were first put to Mr. Bush by Mr. Maliki when the two men met in the Jordanian capital of Amman in November, the picture that is emerging in Baghdad is quite different. What Mr. Maliki wanted, his officials say, was in at least one crucial respect the opposite of what Mr. Bush decided: a lowering of the American profile in the war, not the increase Mr. Bush has ordered.

"These Iraqi officials say Mr. Maliki, in the wake of Mr. Bush's setback in the Democratic sweep in November's midterm elections, demanded that American troops be pulled back to the periphery of Baghdad and that the war in the capital, at least, be handed to Iraqi troops."

So, not surprisingly: "Iraq's Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush's proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan."

Eyes on Iran

In the meantime, many of us here in Washington are trying to figure out just what Bush had in mind Wednesday night when he asserted that "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops" and promised: "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces."

Robin Wright and Nancy Trejos write in The Washington Post: "U.S. troops launched two raids on Iranian targets in Iraq yesterday, following through on President Bush's vow to confront and break up Tehran's networks inside Iraq. Five Iranians were detained, and vast amounts of documents and computer data were confiscated, according to U.S., Iraqi and Iranian officials.

"The two raids are part of a new U.S. intelligence and military operation launched last month against Iran, U.S. officials said. The United States is trying to identify and detain top officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds Brigade operating in Iraq. The al-Quds Brigade is active in arming, training and funding militant movements, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, throughout the Middle East. . . .

"While the public focus is on Iraq, the administration is now spending as much time on plans to contain Iran as on a strategy to end Iraq's violence, U.S. officials said."