Washington – Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a “Churchillian” vision of “victory” in Iraq and defend the country’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. “A constitutional order is emerging,” he said.
Two hours later, around the same conference table, CIA director Michael Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said, “The inability of the government to govern seems irreversible,” adding that he could not “point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,” according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.
“We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function,” he concluded.
Later in the interview, he qualified the statement: “A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable,” he said, “in the short term.”
Hayden’s bleak assessment, just a week after Republicans lost control of Congress in elections and Bush dismissed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the group’s intensive examination of the war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating.”
In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his briefing.
Among the 79 specific recommendations the Iraq Study Group made to Bush was withdrawing support for the al-Maliki government unless it showed “substantial progress” on security and national reconciliation. And it recommended changing the primary mission of U.S. forces from combat to training Iraqis so that combat units could be withdrawn by early 2008.
But Bush did not embrace any of the key recommendations, although bipartisan groups in the House and Senate have sought legislation that would make them official U.S. policy. As recently as Wednesday evening, Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., and Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., introduced such an amendment.
Instead, the president announced in January that he was sending more troops to Iraq as part of a “surge.”
