time for a uturn?

[CD5Passion]

The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.

(Time.com) -- George Bush has a history of long-overdue U-turns.

He waited until he woke up, hung over, one morning at 40 before giving up booze cold. He fought the idea of a homeland-security agency for eight months after 9/11 and then scampered aboard and called it his idea.

But Bush has never had to pull off a U-turn like the one he is contemplating now: to give up on his dream of turning Babylon into an oasis of freedom and democracy and instead begin a staged withdrawal from Iraq, rewrite the mission of the 150,000 U.S. troops there as they begin to draw down, launch a diplomatic Olympics across the Middle East and restart the flagging peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Even calling all that a reversal is misnomer; it would be more like a personality transplant.

But Bush will soon begin the biggest foreign policy course correction of his presidency.

No matter what else may get stapled onto it, the maneuver will be based on what the bipartisan, congressionally mandated commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton reached agreement on last week.

The Baker-Hamilton commission's work has been compared to family interventions for a substance-addicted cousin, but unlike those encounters, this one won't remain behind closed doors. The entire 10-person commission will brief the president Wednesday and then repeat the lesson for congressional leaders, both incoming and outgoing, later the same day.

The Iraq Study Group will call for a massive diplomatic push in two areas in which the White House has never put its shoulder to the grindstone: rekindling peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis and holding an international conference that would lead to direct talks between Washington and Tehran and Damascus.

The Study Group's military proposals are performance-based: they would link a staged withdrawal from Iraq by U.S. forces to stronger actions by the struggling Iraqi government.

Realism was exactly what the people who cooked up the commission had in mind when they set the bipartisan operation in motion more than a year ago. The review began as a $1 million insertion into an appropriations bill by Republican Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, who had gone to Iraq last year and decided the policy wasn't working.

He slotted the money to the U. S. Institute of Peace, whose president, Richard Solomon, approached the one person in Bushland who still had a reputation for realism and who could command the president's ear, alone: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Would she propose the commission to the president?

Rice's request: Don't look back

After some hesitation, Rice agreed, but made one request: the commission had to look forward, not backward, in part because she knew the dysfunctional Bush foreign policy operation, tilted so heavily along the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis, would not permit, much less sustain, scrutiny.

Rice got through to Bush the next day, arguing that the thing was going to happen anyway, so he might as well get on board. To his credit, Bush agreed.

Baker and Hamilton were left to choose their own panelists, and the commission went to work, gathering evidence, making a trip to Baghdad and hearing from more than 100 experts.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor developed a reputation for asking the best questions. Democratic power broker Vernon Jordan emerged as the group's political sage. Clinton defense chief William Perry cornered the military options -- and would be a holdout on the final deal.

When Democrats swept the November elections, aides to several panelists told Time that the commission would have more room to make sweeping proposals. Rumsfeld's resignation the next day cemented that feeling.

But the election, instead of making things easier, actually made them harder.

Psychoanalysis and the prodigal son

When Bush replaced Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission who had served the first President Bush as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the psychoanalysis rampant in the media about daddy's team coming back to save the prodigal son steamed everyone at the White House, from the president on down, and led the administration to dig in its heels.

Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq itself kept deteriorating and there was a risk that the panel's proposals would be obsolete before consensus was reached.

Baker turned up last Monday with a draft report he wanted panel members to consider or amend and then get into the president's hands. Democrats led by Hamilton, Perry and Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's ex-chief of staff, were adamant that the report recommend a firm starting point for troop withdrawals. When the Republicans again refused, members agreed on language that would leave the date vague but the vector clear. And then the group adjourned.

'No idea how things will look in February'

Bush will put a few weeks between the big Baker-Hamilton rollout and his own restart -- White House officials worry that anything faster would look too reactive -- but one official told Time that the new path the president will outline in coming weeks is "significantly different than what we've been doing. ...When the president says we're going to get the job done, that doesn't suggest it is an open-ended commitment forever."

Whether it is the Baker approach or whatever the White House decides to call its own, events in Iraq could easily make any plan for diplomacy and withdrawal irrelevant in the face of a weak central government, a deepening civil war and widespread violence.

A commission official put it this way, "What we have produced is a plan for December. We have no idea what things are going to look like in February."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/...rss_topstories