Searching for an Iraq Exit Strategy

By MICHAEL DUFFY

In the heady days after the first Gulf War, Robert Gates liked to tell a story about his boss, George Herbert Walker Bush. As Bush 41 was preparing to invade Kuwait in 1990 and free that nation from the clutches of Saddam Hussein, Pentagon generals came up with what they thought was a clever scheme that might prevent the President from going to war. Gates was in the Oval Office when the generals brought in maps, charts and pointers and told Bush that Kuwait could be liberated only if he was willing to spend six months deploying half a million troops halfway round the globe. The reluctant generals were betting, Gates explained, that no U.S. President would agree to such a crazy and expensive adventure. But what made Gates smile when he told the story was the cool and determined way Bush responded to the uniforms' rush job. "Sounds right," said the old Navy pilot. "Do it." The generals left the Oval Office looking pale and drawn. And the biggest and most successful U.S. military operation since World War II got under way.

Soon it will be Gates' job to go into the Oval Office with his own set of pointers, maps and charts, and run a very different briefing for a very different member of the Bush family about a very different conflict in Iraq. This time, Gates will be advising George W. Bush on how to get out of--not into--a war, even though the President still believes, in the face of a humbling electoral repudiation and a U.S. death toll approaching 3,000, that the invasion of Iraq was wise, worthy and well planned. Gates' task as the new Defense Secretary is to preach change to a leader who has stuck to his line--despite all kinds of evidence to the contrary--for years now.

The Greeks believed that the gods visit the sins of the fathers upon their sons. But when it comes to the Bush family and Iraq, the tragedy runs from stem to root. And so over the next few weeks, key members of Bush's father's vaunted foreign policy team--the real A-team of the Republican foreign policy establishment--will step in and conduct what amounts to a family intervention. Led by former CIA Director Gates and former Secretary of State James Baker, who co-heads a commission on Iraq, Dad's former aides will present the son with a plan for saving his presidency and, with it, some remnant of the family's brand name. None of those involved will call it an intervention, but it's fair to say the nation's future is at stake. Although Gates and Baker will be out front, others who worked for the patriarch are helping behind the scenes. Dynasties don't get to be dynasties by neglecting the line.

The task facing the Old Guard is to fashion an exit strategy from Iraq that can salvage U.S. prestige and avoid turning the civil war into an even wider and more violent catastrophe. There are only a few known knowns here: it surely pains the father that it has come to this. It is just as galling to the son that he had to invite his father's most trusted consiglieres to step in and help clean up his mess overseas. Neither man appreciates the chortling sounds coming from the vast Bush 41 crowd, which has long harbored grave doubts about the soundness of 43's foreign policy team. The biggest question is how the object of the intervention will react. As one senior official in the 41 White House says of the President, "He can fight this and turn into a constantly warring figure, or he can turn back into the friendly wise guy who gets along with everyone. The latter will serve him much better."

It does help Bush that the return of the realists comes at the very moment when both parties are looking for political cover on the war that went wrong. Although the leaders of the new Democratic majority in Congress say they plan to hold the Administration accountable for the spiraling costs, mismanagement and graft associated with the war, the reality is that the party remains divided over what kind of military strategy to pursue now. Democrats who voted for the war and have been on the defensive with the party's antiwar base are anxious to get behind any sign that points to an exit. Those who voted against the war but who don't have a clue about how to stabilize Iraq want to find a program they can get behind without looking like silly skedaddlers. The Republicans are equally torn, between realists furious at the Administration for refusing to change course sooner and true believers who fret that the White House is about to abandon the neoconservative project to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Given all those diverging views, it's understandable that Bush talks about the commission headed by Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton the way a child who can't wait for Christmas talks about Santa Claus. Bush mentioned the commission four times in his press conference last week. The President opposed the creation of the panel last fall but eventually came around, in part at the urging of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Worried about whether the White House believed in the commission from the start, Baker insisted on meeting with the President before taking the job and insisted that Bush personally ask him to take it on. Baker told Bush in his private session that he was likely to come up with recommendations that Bush might not favor. Asked by Baker whether he truly backed an approach that would lead to a strategic change, Bush said he did.

Since then, relations between the White House and the study group haven't always been perfect. When a White House official made skeptical statements in early fall about the group's direction, angry Democrats on the panel warned Baker that they would not be part of a charade. Baker in turn went on TV and reported that the White House was still on board, while privately informing the West Wing to shut down the skeptics for good. Baker has been strict about stressing the bipartisan nature of the group--which includes Clinton advisers like Leon Panetta and William Perry as well as former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson and Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese--and he told TIME it will act only by consensus. Still, everyone agrees that Baker is the first among equals.

So far, the Baker group has convened a number of listening sessions; its deliberations as a group begin this week. It is already evident that the panel is not laboring under illusions about the grim outlook for the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. The commission returned from its brief trip to Baghdad in September collectively stunned by the chaos--which is interesting, since they barely got to see it. They apparently saw enough: the donning of the body armor, the corkscrew approach in the Air Force cargo plane, the harrowing treetop chopper flight into the Green Zone--it all left the commissioners shaken, according to an adviser to one member. There are no plans to go back.

Instead, something akin to a shadow State Department has sprung up to figure out how to extricate the U.S. from Iraq. Baker and Hamilton reached deep into the government's foreign policy ranks--active and retired--and plucked their favorite generals, spooks and analysts to work in complete secrecy, installing some in a nondescript building that houses the U.S. Institute of Peace. Some 50 advisers, both here and in Iraq, have kicked in reports and working papers; Baker and his team have fired questions back at those who are the most promising. Baker has been in touch with representatives from Iran and Syria, countries the U.S. isn't keen to cozy up to. And about a dozen longtime aides and diplomatic wizards, including Brent Scowcroft, the grand master of the foreign policy establishment, are in communication with Baker and Hamilton as they go down to the wire. The bipartisan pragmatism encouraged by the Baker-Hamilton group, says Clinton U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, marks an end to the era when U.S. foreign policy was crafted by people who looked at the world as they wanted it to be, not the world as it was. Says Holbrooke: "Now there is a tremendous wedge between the neoconservatives and the rest of the national-security community."

Getting out of Iraq will require the sort of hard choices between interests and ideals that the Bush Administration has been historically reluctant to make. The Baker group is considering a series of proposals that will include calling for intensive regional diplomacy, such as direct, high-level talks with Iran and Syria--something the Bush team has resisted for months. Most significant, the commission plans to outline a plan for redeploying--that is to say, pulling out--some U.S. troops over the next year. The group is also considering telling the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad that U.S. troops will stay and help steady the country only if the government puts an end to sectarian violence. If the killings continue, the U.S. will pull out quickly. "If these things don't happen," said Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, "we're going to have to move out faster."

Baker has been talking to the President directly for months. The two men have a long history. It was Bush who installed himself in Washington in 1986 to keep an eye on his father's presidential campaign, then being run by Baker. And it was Baker who led the legal fight in Florida that handed W. his presidency in 2001. But if Baker is now laying the groundwork for another bailout of the man he once referred to as Junior, he can also thank Bush for bringing him back to center stage at a time of genuine national crisis. Baker has held three Cabinet posts, overseen a fourth agency and run five presidential campaigns. Untying the Gordian knot that is Iraq would cement his reputation as one of the nation's premier wise men of the past 30 years.

It is tantalizing to imagine that Baker, who plans to issue his report next month, pushed Bush to dump Rumsfeld for Gates. A former Baker aide last week called the coincidence of timing "painfully obvious" and noted the appointment of Gates to the Baker commission last year. There is also the fact that Rumsfeld has long been resented by many Bush 41 loyalists, who recall the way Rumsfeld schemed to get Bush appointed director of the CIA in 1976 to prevent him from becoming Gerald Ford's running mate that year. But there were more pressing reasons for Rumsfeld to go--and quickly. "Baker wasn't going to let his report come out," says a Gates aide, "so that Rummy could stomp all over it." As for Bush 41, he is staying above the nitty-gritty of the takeover, says one of 41's former aides, but "he's definitely in the loop."

It will fall to Gates to execute the Baker plan. Bush first approached Gates about joining his team more than a year ago, when he was looking for a new director of national intelligence. As a former CIA director, Gates found the offer tempting but declined after he decided that the job amounted to little more than overseeing a vast bureaucracy rather than running a real intelligence operation. Bush didn't offer the Pentagon job to Gates until early last week. A little cloak-and-dagger was used to sneak Gates onto the President's ranch for his job interview: he was instructed to meet White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and his deputy, Joe Hagin, at a supermarket parking lot in nearby McGregor, Texas, for the drive to Crawford. The President slipped out to meet Gates at the new office that opened on the ranch in 2004.

Having worked at the White House and run the CIA, Gates will manage the budgets, bureaucrats, jargon and generals on the Pentagon's E-Ring easily enough. But he will be judged by only one rule: whether he can organize what a Baker aide calls "the orderly transition and exit from Iraq." Someone who has worked with him describes Gates as "serious, subtle, reflective, never curt or abrupt." Departing CIA directors are flooded with offers of corporate jobs and strategic intelligence posts. Instead, when Gates left government in early 1993, he fled to Washington State, where he spent the next few years in a library working on his memoirs.

That was, in many ways, a return to where he started. He rose through the CIA's analysis directorate as a Russia scholar during the 1970s until plucked for stardom by Reagan spymaster William Casey. Gates had a reputation as a tough-nosed hard-liner; in fact, Gates was never a mirror image of the shrewdly moderate Baker. During the first Bush Administration, Gates was far more skeptical of Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika program than was either Baker or the President. Gates' closest ally in that minor crusade was none other than then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Gates' nickname in the first Bush White House was Eyeore: no matter the topic, he always seemed to worry about the worst-case scenario. Gates, who has a healthy sense of humor, was usually the first to admit he was the in-house pessimist.

He has also seen his share of controversy. Partly because he worked for Casey, Gates was a minor player in the Iran-contra scandal and was criticized for skewing intelligence analysis on the Soviets to suit hard-liners in the Reagan White House. More than 30 Democrats--10 of whom are still in the Senate--opposed his nomination to be CIA director in 1991. Gates went into his confirmation that year carrying a small, white oblong stone in his pocket, a memento of a hike he had taken in the Olympic mountains the summer before. He wanted a reminder of what he had to look forward to in case his nomination failed. He may want to dig that stone out of his closet. Given the current Administration's record of laundering intelligence, Gates is sure to endure another round of questions about his past in his confirmation hearings next month.

But Bob Gates is probably under no illusions about the limitations he faces. He once told TIME that people who go to work at the White House pass through two distinct stages of astonishment. At first, they are amazed at what the place can do. But then they are quickly disillusioned by what it cannot accomplish. Putting an Iraqi exit plan in front of the President will be relatively simple. Winning Bush's full support may be harder. And executing it in a country where strategic planning is almost an oxymoron may prove beyond any man's--or any White House's--capability.

With reporting by Mike Allen, SALLY B. DONNELLY, Elaine Shannon, MARK THOMPSON, Douglas Waller/ Washington, Bobby Ghosh, Mark Kukis/ Baghdad