Condi's Iraq surprise

In a secret end run around Cheney and Rumsfeld, the secretary of state pressed Bush to back the Iraq Study Group -- and change the course of the war.

By Mark Benjamin


Nov. 17, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- In late 2005, three Washington insiders with foreign policy expertise were summoned to a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- a little-known event that may end up changing the course of the war in Iraq. The three men were working to help Rep. Frank Wolf, who wanted to create an independent panel to overhaul the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, after a recent trip there left the Virginia Republican worried that the war was headed from bad to worse.

The three men, to their surprise, were asked to attend a meeting on Nov. 29, 2005, with Rice, who had been among the core defenders of the Bush administration's war in Iraq. At the end of that meeting, Rice agreed to the idea for the panel and pledged to take the case directly to President Bush. At Rice's urging, Bush embraced what would become the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker.

"It was remarkable that Condi Rice took the lead," said David Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington, and one of four people in the November meeting, including Rice. The Iraq Study Group, he said, "happened with her going to the president."

It has been widely speculated that George H.W. Bush, the president's father, turned to his trusted former advisor Baker to help orchestrate the Iraq Study Group to clean up the Iraq mess. But the little-known story of how the panel came into being began not with Baker, but with a congressman's effort to call it like he saw it in Iraq -- and with Rice's maneuvering to sidestep an entrenched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It set in motion the unlikely scenario now playing out in Washington in which an independent panel is about to counsel a White House not typically known as receptive to outside advice on the war.

Wolf contacted Abshire in fall 2005 to discuss assembling the panel after Wolf had returned from his third trip to Iraq. At that time, the message from the White House on Iraq was unequivocally upbeat: Things are getting better. Stay the course.

But Wolf's most recent trip left him with the view that security in the country might actually be deteriorating, despite the rosy message from the Oval Office. "Some things were worse," Wolf confirmed about that Iraq trip in an interview. He wanted some "fresh eyes," he said, on the Iraq situation.

Abshire agreed to help. Abshire began working with Richard Solomon, president of the congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace, and John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to pull together a plan.

One challenge was finding the right people. They had to be sufficiently independent. Wolf says that he wanted "people who were not connected to the administration nor connected to the Democratic campaign committee," people who could "honestly" tackle the problem.

Former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton seemed like an obvious choice. A highly respected voice on foreign policy, Hamilton had been vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Abshire called him first, in November. Abshire then contacted Baker, a man with obvious foreign policy credentials, who maintains close ties to the Bush family.

Abshire bristled a bit when asked about speculation in the press that somehow Baker had set up the group as some sort of favor to help out the president's father. "It is sometimes misunderstood that this is a group that Baker formed," he said.

In fact, Abshire says that when he called him, Baker first showed reluctance, immediately pointing out an obvious hurdle. Without buy-in from the White House, the panel would be dead in the water. "I called Jim Baker in November and he said he would do it if the president really wanted him to do it," Abshire recalls. One problem was that the White House could potentially encourage Republicans not to participate in the panel. That could impede access to key officials. The administration could be stingy with documents. It could, in essence, make the panel useless. "They could have stonewalled it," Abshire said. "They could have killed it."

Abshire is an experienced Washington hand himself who held a number of posts during the Reagan administration, including ambassador to NATO and special counselor to the president. He knew that Baker was right: White House cooperation was essential. "They had been very single track," Abshire said, describing the Bush administration's general attitude toward unsolicited advice. "Courageous, but single track," he clarified.

But Rice's summoning of Abshire, Solomon and Hamre to that November 2005 meeting was an opening. Her support was vital in getting around a wing of the Bush administration that could try to kill the panel idea. Rice's uneasiness with the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction on Iraq was beginning to emerge publicly by then, but there has been little if any public evidence that she has acted aggressively on her concerns. "That was a great triumph that this other wing came out on top," Abshire said.

Wolf did not attend the meeting with Abshire and the others, but he met separately with Rice and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley around the same time to get support for his idea. He described Rice as the key "entr\ufffde" to the White House. "Had she not bought into it, it certainly would not have taken place," he said about the panel.

Wolf, a well-respected moderate Republican, pushed through Congress funding to help create the panel, which was officially unveiled two months later at a March 15 press conference in the Russell Senate Office Building. Baker told reporters then that the Iraq Study Group had the full support of the White House. "The administration as we understand it will welcome the effort," Baker said. "They will cooperate with our effort in terms of access to people and documents."

Next page: As Wolf witnessed a darkening situation on the ground, Bush gave upbeat speeches about Iraq's improvement

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What Wolf saw in Iraq late last year prompted him to write an editorial that appeared in the Washington Post on Sept. 24, 2005, calling for the creation of "an independent and balanced group of respected individuals" to take another look at Iraq strategy. Then, on Nov. 10, Wolf, Shays and five other House Republicans wrote to Bush, expressing support for an independent panel to "perform a comprehensive review" of the Iraq plan. Four months later, the Iraq Study Group -- with Rice's inside help -- moved into action.

Following various leaks to the media, there has been much hype over the coming recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, expected by the end of the year. But it remains unclear whether the panel will focus on logistical issues like troop levels, or focus on a broader overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the region, with an emphasis on diplomatic engagement. One thing is clear, though: Washington and the rest of the nation await findings they hope will help bring an end to the downward spiral of the now nearly four-year adventure in Iraq.