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By DAVID E. SANGER Published: September 10, 2007
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Nearly two years ago, President Bush tried to avert an incipient rebellion in Congress over Iraq by presenting a new strategy that he said would be a prelude to a decrease in American forces. He began the effort with a speech at the United States Naval Academy where midshipmen interrupted him with hearty cheers.
Behind him, the White House had erected a huge backdrop emblazoned with the words: “Plan for Victory.”
On Monday afternoon, when Gen. David H. Petraeus begins testifying about the latest plan for extracting troops — a slow process that could begin as early as December — no one will be talking about achieving victory, just stability. Nor will there be orchestrated cheers. Part of the strategy this time is to keep Mr. Bush well in the background until later in the week, when he is expected to address the country with a revised plan, picking a course that the White House hopes will end the unusually public disagreements among the president’s military advisers about how much more effort and blood to invest in the war.
There is no doubt that Mr. Bush still staunchly believes that the Iraq project can be salvaged; visiting Anbar Province last Monday, he used the word “success” a half-dozen times. But the kind of “victory” he described in November 2005, when Representative John P. Murtha initiated the first Democratic calls to get out of Iraq, is no longer discussed as the goal.
Back then, Mr. Bush’s 38-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” defined victory with a set of short-, medium- and long-term goals whose accomplishment, he said, would guide the withdrawal of troops. Among the short-term goals were “meeting political milestones; building democratic institutions; standing up robust security forces to gather intelligence, destroy terrorist networks, and maintain security; and tackling key economic reforms to lay the foundation for a sound economy.”
General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, several senior administration officials acknowledge, will have to say that two years and two strategies later, those goals still appear distant — the one common point of agreement in the tornado of recent reports from government agencies, the intelligence community and panels of outside experts. “It’s Crocker who has the harder job,” a senior administration official said last week. “Petraeus can argue that he’s gotten somewhere. It’s a much harder case to make on reconciliation.”
General Petraeus’s task, administration insiders and some outsiders said, is to use his credibility among Democrats and Republicans to make a case that President Bush can no longer make without support. Then comes the hard part: easing Mr. Bush, a man who revels in his own steadfastness, out of the straitjacket of his past optimistic pronouncements about what must be accomplished.
Mr. Bush, as Robert Draper reported in his recent biography, “Dead Certain,” has said he must sound optimistic themes because that is who he is — and because no one would follow a president who was publicly racked with doubt. It is a lesson that Mr. Bush is said to have extracted not only from his upbringing, but from his memories of another Texas president, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Now, however, Mr. Bush’s talk of “victory” or “success” has run headlong into the sober assessments of the National Intelligence Estimate, which Democrats plan to raise in the hearings this week. Mr. Bush has also heard in recent days from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are worried about the sustainability of current operations, and he has heard the concerns of the admiral in charge of Central Command, William J. Fallon, who has argued that with so many resources tied up in Iraq, the United States is dangerously unprepared for other confrontations, including the possibility of one with Iran.
“There’s a lot of scar tissue that everyone has to cut through around here,” said one senior administration official, who has been surprised by the degree to which Mr. Bush and his longtime aides are trapped by their own vision, and past statements, of how success in Iraq would transform the Middle East. One former senior official, brought in for consultations recently to the White House, said he now feared that Tehran, not the United States, had the greater influence over events in Iraq. “There was silence in the room,” he said.
But by the end of the week, Mr. Bush may find he is holding a number of cards. In recent interviews, Mr. Bush’s aides have signaled the argument he will be making: that the progress General Petraeus has made at the provincial level, where Sunni Arabs have turned against Al Qaeda, will slowly start affecting politics and the potential for reconciliation in Baghdad, at the national level. He will argue that the change in attitude among Sunnis has created an opening that the United States must exploit, an argument that already appears to have persuaded some wavering Republicans in the Senate.
While it is unclear what Mr. Bush will say when he addresses the country, it does seem clear that he will no longer insist on “victory,” in the way he used the term in 2005, before troops can come home. Something more akin to Nixon’s “Peace With Honor” appears to be in the cards, officials say, rewritten and updated for a very different kind of war.
Mr. Bush can take heart from Nixon’s experience: 37 years ago, the Senate defeated the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, which would have forced an end to military operations in Vietnam within months and forced a withdrawal the next year. If history does not repeat itself, it rhymes: the Democrats are backing away from plans they made in early summer, to push again for a hard deadline for troop withdrawal after General Petraeus’s testimony.
Nonetheless, this week is likely to be regarded as a momentous one. Until a week ago, every presidential speech, every bit of military testimony, was about the need to persevere, and to add troops. Starting Monday, the new argument seems almost certainly to be about how fast or how cautiously to draw down, and what would constitute a “sustainable” presence in a country that even most of the Democratic presidential candidates acknowledge will require a major American presence for years to come.
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