Five-year plan for Iraq appears to preempt Petraeus

Bush really didn't want to hear another word from the Baker-Hamilton group.  Two months ago, in July, Congress asked the Iraq Study Group to reconvene.  But the White House stopped it.

The White House has blocked reconvening the bipartisan panel to provide a second independent assessment of the military and political situation in Iraq, said several sources involved in the panel's December 2006 report.

Co-Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, several panel members and the U.S. Institute of Peace, which ran the study group, were willing to participate, according to Hamilton and the congressionally funded think tank. But the White House did not give the green light for co-chairman and former secretary of state James A. Baker III to participate, and Baker is unwilling to lead a second review without President Bush's approval, according to members of the original panel and sources close to Baker.

There was no way they could actually function without approval from the White House -- and funding.  And, of course, access to key documents.  Nothing, the White House made clear, was to get in the way of the "Petraeus Report."

That was July.  This is now.  The Institute for Peace, which ran the Iraq Study Group, is funded by Congress and is made up of "two dozen former U.S. officials and ambassadors, former CIA analysts, and Iraq specialists from think tanks and universities" who were advisers of the Baker-Hamilton group.  The House did an end run around the White House and asked for a report.  That report is coming out now (Sunday, September 9),  a day before Crocker and Petraeus go before Congress ostensibly to plead the administration's case.   The Institute for Peace's report calls for a clearcut " 50 percent reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq within three years and a total withdrawal and handover of security to the Iraqi military in five years."  It also appears to cut the Bush administration out of dealings with the Iraq government on oil, elections, etc.

The recommendations in "Iraq: A Time for Change," the last of several reports published in the run-up to the Bush administration's assessment of Iraq this week, also call on the United Nations to immediately begin "intense negotiations" with Iraq's squabbling politicians. The talks should not be allowed to adjourn without agreements on power-sharing, revising the constitution, oil resources, local elections, easing a ban on former Baath Party members and the future of Kirkuk, the report says.

With the plethora of reports already on the table and in the press, the vast majority of which have given very gloomy reports on the failings of the "surge," the waters appear to have been roiled and muddied for the administration's assessment -- aka "Petraeus Report."