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After months of suspense, the top-level commission probing US strategic options in Iraq this week unveils a report seen as the last, best chance for President George W. Bush to change course.
So acute is gloom here over Iraq's slide into chaos, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) co-chaired by veteran US operator James Baker has generated feverish expectations that will be tough to meet.
It is expected to urge the Bush administration to dispense with its distaste for direct talks with Syria and Iran over Iraq's plight, and to call for a gradual pullback of most US combat troops in the country.
Even before the long-awaited report is released Wednesday, serious doubts are mounting over whether Bush will be prepared to implement all or some of its findings — and even over the relevance of recommendations produced in the safety of Washington as Iraq plummets into horror.
“This is a time, in which to have any hope of succeeding, you are going to need a level of leadership which admits the risk, the costs, and past mistakes,” said Anthony Cordesman, a respected military analyst.
“That is a choice for the administration to make.”
S. Azmat Hassan, former Pakistani ambassador to Syria, Lebanon and Morocco, said the ISG's report would strike at the core of Bush's presidency.
“Either he can go down with the ship, or he can try to salvage something from the past policies which have largely failed by starting a different course towards engagement with Iraq's neighbours,” said Hassan, now at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy at Seton Hall University.
The report has been seen as political cover for the president to back away from his insistence that US troops will not leave Iraq until their job — defined by Bush as training Iraqi troops and leaving an elected government able to defend itself — is done.
But Bush has already staked out a position which appears to directly contradict several of the ISG's recommendations, on Syria, Iran and the redeployment of American battle troops.
“One thing I won't do, I am not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he said in Latvia last week.
As commander in chief, Bush has the final say on military affairs and foreign policy, and the report is not binding.
Several other reviews of US policy are taking place within the administration, a move analysts say may be intended to allow Bush to pick and choose findings to his liking from each probe.
Though leaked reports in US media suggest the ISG will impose no rigid timetable for the withdrawal of troops, it may imply their presence in the country is not open ended, in an apparent attempt to coerce Iraq's leaders into cracking down on out of control militia violence.
The ISG report may also significantly increase political pressure on Bush to change the way America is fighting the war, with sour public opinion on the conflict helping to defeat his Republican Party in November's congressional election.
Another potential question mark is to what extent the report will impact conditions on the ground, with US frustration acute at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's failure to rein in militias, and insurgency raging against the US occupation, and terror attacks mounted by Al-Qaeda.
Add to that the growing influence of Iran in alliance to some of the more radical Shiite groups, and the failure of Washington to impose security more than three years after the invasion.
“From the beginning, we've worried that this entire agenda could be swept away by events,” the New York Times quoted an unidentified person involved in the committee deliberations, as saying this week.
Eric Hooglund, an Iran expert and professor of politics at Bates College, said whatever the commission comes up with, the key question will be how much influence the United States has left in Iraq.
“The United States has been reduced to a passive role, unfortunately … (and) has been gradually loosing its influence and authority,” he said.
The group was created in March to study the situation in Iraq and has also interviewed British Prime Minister Tony Blair, foreign diplomats, officials and academics as it plotted a way forward in the violence-wracked country.
Baker, long a valued adviser to the Bush family and the Republican Party, co-chairs the commission with Democratic former lawmaker Lee Hamilton.
The group also includes former US Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor; former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger; Vernon Jordan, senior managing director at Lazard, Freres and Co.; former US attorney general Edwin Meese; Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff; former secretary of defense William Perry; and two former senators, Charles Robb and Alan Simpson.
