WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — President Bush moved quickly to distance himself on Thursday from the central recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, even as the panel's co-chairmen opened an intensive lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to press Mr. Bush to adopt their report wholesale.
One day after the study group rattled Washington with its bleak assessment of conditions in Iraq, its Republican co-chairman, James A. Baker III, said the White House must not treat the report "like a fruit salad," while the Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, called on Congress to abandon its "extremely timid" approach to overseeing the war.
But Mr. Bush, making his first extended comments on the study, seemed to push back against two of its most fundamental recommendations: pulling back American combat brigades from Iraq over the next 15 months, and engaging in direct talks with Iran and Syria. He said he needed to be "flexible and realistic" in making decisions about troop movements, and he set conditions for talks with Iran and Syria that neither country was likely to accept.
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Three other reviews — one by the Pentagon, one by the State Department and one by the National Security Council — are under way, and Mr. Bush reiterated Thursday that while he believed that the nation needed "a new approach" in Iraq, he would make no decision until he received those reports.
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Though the Iraq Study Group also called for keeping enough American troops in place to provide protection to expanded teams of American advisers attached to Iraqi Army units, Pentagon officials fear that the panel's recommendations, if adopted, could lead to withdrawals of substantial American troops before the Iraqi units can stand on their own.
The study group said combat brigades could withdraw from Iraq by the first quarter of 2008 if conditions on the ground permitted. Some analysts say that phrasing gives Mr. Bush wiggle room to ignore the call for withdrawal, and on Thursday Mr. Bush seized on that "qualifier," as he called it. "I thought that made a lot of sense. I've always said we'd like our troops out as fast as possible."
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On Iran and Syria, Mr. Bush stuck to the conditions he set long ago for talks: Iran must abandon its nuclear program, and Syria must give up its support for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. "If they want to sit down at the table with the United States, it's easy — just make some decisions that will lead to peace, not to conflict," he said. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>