Bush: ‘I’m not going to be rushed’ on Iraq shift

High-profile outreach
Bush met Wednesday with senior defense officials at the Pentagon. He already has visited this week with State Department officials to review options, hosted a few outside Iraq experts, and met with Iraq’s Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi. Last week, the president held talks with the leader of the largest Shiite bloc in Iraq’s parliament, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, and with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the president’s staunchest war ally.

Iraq has proposed that its troops assume primary responsibility for security in Baghdad early next year and that U.S. troops be shifted to the capital’s periphery, The New York Times reported on its Web site Tuesday night.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told the Times that the plan was presented during Bush’s meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, on Nov. 30.

Bush’s meetings at the Pentagon capped his high-profile outreach effort surrounding last week’s presentation of the Iraq Study Group report, a blistering review from an independent, bipartisan commission.

The Iraq Study Group recommended most combat troops be withdrawn by early 2008 and the U.S. mission changed from combat to training and support of Iraqi units. It also called for an energetic effort to seek a diplomatic solution to Iraq’s violence by engaging its neighbors, including Iran and Syria.

Bush postpones announcement
Bush, cool to both of the commission’s central ideas, had been expected to follow his information-gathering with a pre-Christmas announcement of his own altered blueprint for U.S. involvement in Iraq. But the White House said Tuesday that Bush would wait until early next year.

“It’s not ready yet,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said. “There may be some areas on which there are still going to be debates, but most have kind of been ironed out.”

Dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the war is at an all-time high. Democrats take control of Congress on Jan. 4 because of midterm elections that turned in large part on that issue.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., about to become Senate majority leader, criticized Bush’s decision to delay unveiling the new Iraq plan.

“It has been six weeks since the American people demanded change in Iraq. In that time Iraq has descended further toward all-out civil war and all the president has done is fire Donald Rumsfeld and conduct a listening tour,” Reid said.

“Talking to the same people he should have talked to four years ago does not relieve the president of the need to demonstrate leadership and change his policy now,” he said.

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