Bush Tries Moving the Goalposts

A New Strategy?

So is the administration considering a new strategy? DeYoung and Ricks write that "though some, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have indicated flexibility toward other options, including early troop redeployments, Bush has made no decisions on a possible new course.

"'The heart of darkness is the president,' the person said. 'Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him.'"

David E. Sanger writes in this morning's New York Times: "White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush's Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities. . . .

"[S]ome aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. . . .

"Last week, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called in from a brief vacation to join intense discussions in sessions that included Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's longtime strategist, and Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff. . . .

"The views of many of the participants in that discussion were unclear, and the officials interviewed could not provide any insight into what Vice President Dick Cheney had been telling President Bush.

"They described Mr. Hadley as deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Mr. Rove. But they also said that Mr. Rove had warned that if Mr. Bush went too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections -- and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Mr. Bush has always said he would oppose."

I've long wondered how influential Rove was in setting military policy. There's a hint.

But there is usually some administration official or another willing to tell reporters that a change in strategy is around the corner. Consider another Sanger story, in which he reported that some Bush aides were hinting "that the administration had already come up with a 'Plan B' in case the latest strategy failed, with one saying 'there are other ways to achieve our objective.' But he would not describe that strategy, or say if it involved withdrawal, containment or the breakup of the country into sectarian entities." When did Sanger write that? On Jan. 11, the day after Bush announced the surge.

And Terence Hunt reports for the Associated Press that White House Press Secretary Tony Snow this morning slapped down the Times story. "There is no debate right now on withdrawing forces right now from Iraq," Snow said.

"The president has said many times that as conditions require and merit that there will be in fact withdrawals and also pulling back from areas of Baghdad and so on," Snow said. "But the idea of trying to make a political judgment rather than a military judgment about how to have forces in the field is simply not true."

How to reconcile all this? One way is to hypothesize that there are indeed White House aides hoping for a change in strategy -- but they're not necessarily getting any traction.