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Bush seeks advice on Iraq policy Mr Bush is to make a televised address on Iraq before Christmas US President George W Bush has opened three days of intensive talks on Iraq, as he weighs possible policy changes. Without mentioning Iran and Syria by name, Mr Bush said Iraq's neighbours also bore responsibility for helping foster Iraqi security and democracy. His comments came after consultations with senior State Department officials. The talks follow a recent report on US policy in Iraq that called for urgent action to stop "a slide towards chaos", including talks with Iran and Syria. The...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi president said Sunday the bipartisan U.S. report calling for a new approach to the war offered dangerous recommendations that would undermine his country's sovereignty and were "an insult to the people of Iraq." President Jalal Talabani was the most senior government official to take a stand against the Iraq Study Group report, which has come under criticism from leaders of the governing Shiite and Kurdish parties. He said the report "is not fair, is not just, and it contains some very dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and the constitution." He singled...

HOLIDAY BLUES 'Christmas' is 'semantics' to Democrat Sen. Murray Spokeswoman insists this is time to celebrate 'the season' Posted: December 8, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern The omission by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., of the word "Christmas" when addressing those who watched this week's lighting of the 65-foot Pacific Silver Fir that this year is serving as the "Capitol Christmas Tree" apparently was no oversight. As WND exclusively reported, Murray rebuffed instructions given last year by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., that the national tree in front of the U.S. Capitol be referred to as the "Capitol Christmas Tree,"...

All the backslapping over the Baker panel’s report ignores the fact that the Iraq Study Group didn’t say much. In Washington, sometimes it’s preferable to be wrong in a group than to be right alone. Nothing demonstrates the triumph of this truism better than the release Wednesday of the final Iraq Study Group report. The commission’s chairman, James A. Baker III, could not have been more obvious if he had used hand puppets to illustrate what he thought was most important about this supposedly momentous occasion: the fact that all the report’s authors actually agree with its contents. Their product,...

On the eve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit last week, President Bush urged NATO allies to do more to tackle the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, saying member nations "must accept difficult assignments if we expect to be successful." There is no doubt that more needs to be done to secure, stabilize, and rebuild Afghanistan, but Bush’s words really just prove how unstable the situation in the Middle East has become. With Iraq nearing a civil war -- many leaders, including Bush’s former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are already calling it one -- and Afghanistan the major...

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - 1207dvs-mideast-reaction Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday rejected a U.S. advisory group's conclusions that Israel must talk to Syria and solve its conflict with the Palestinians to help the Bush administration stabilize Iraq. "Syria is not about to stop supporting Mideast extremists and Iraq is not linked to the Israel-Palestinian issue," Olmert said. Still, he added that Israel wants to restart peace talks with the Palestinians "with all our might." Elsewhere in the Middle East, many Arabs interpreted the panel's bleak assessment of President Bush's Iraq policies as proof of Washington's failure in the region,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi citizens said Thursday a U.S. advisory's group recommendation that Washington move toward military disengagement offered little hope of an improvement in their lives anytime soon. The Iraqi government said that the Iraq Study Group's recommendation was in line with its own plans to stop the rampant violence, but cautioned that there was no "magic wand" to solve the country's problems. "The situation is grave, very grave in fact, and cannot be tolerated," Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh said Wednesday on the pan Arab satellite TV channel Al-Arabiya. "Absolute dependence on foreign troops is not possible....

So many careers and reputations have been ravaged by Iraq. Even James Baker, the canniest of operators, has now met his Waterloo. The report of the Iraq Study Group—which Baker co-chaired with Lee Hamilton, that other Wise Man-wannabe—was doomed to fall short of expectations. But who knew it would amount to such an amorphous, equivocal grab bag. Its outline of a new "diplomatic offensive" is so disjointed that even a willing president would be left puzzled by what precisely to do, and George W. Bush seems far from willing. Its scheme for a new military strategy contains so many loopholes...

WASHINGTON -- With Iraq falling apart, it's getting lonely at the top for President Bush.His hawkish neo-con advisers are deserting him. He had to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Democrats have won control of Congress. U.S. allies are angry at his Iraq policies. And even Henry Kissinger -- one of Bush's foreign policy advisers and a key architect of the Vietnam debacle -- has decided Iraq is a can't-win situation. He earlier had told Bush, "The only exit strategy is victory."Bush's father, former President George H. W. Bush, has come to his defense. It's Bush 41 rushing to rescue...

HH: Explain your reaction, if you’ve had a chance to read even the executive summary…I’ve been through the whole document, and it is a disaster if it is followed. CH: Yes, it is indeed. Why, you ask? Well, it means that both our friends and our enemies in the region are in a sense put on notice, that in the case of the enemies, all they have to do is wait us out. And in the case of our friends, that we don’t have much of an appetite for sticking by them. That’s to say the democrats in Lebanon and...

Bush Says Victory in Iraq is Important

THERE'S a great anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, a delegation touting itself as "the weighty men of Delaware" visited Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln's response, as noted at anecdotage.com: "Did it ever occur to you gentlemen, that there was a danger of your little state tipping up in your absence?" Which brings to my mind the Iraq Study Group. Co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, and former House International Relations Committee Chair Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, the ISG calls itself "a bipartisan group of senior individuals who have had distinguished careers in...

The Iraq Study Group is charged with correcting the US course in Iraq in a manner that will be broadly acceptable to the ruling Republicans and the opposition Democrats.The bipartisan panel's influence became apparent as clamour for a change in Iraq policy climaxed in a mid-term poll defeat for the Republicans. A panel member, former CIA boss Robert Gates, was nominated to replace Donald Rumsfeld, who quit as defence secretary after the election. And weeks before the report was to be released, the White House appeared to endorse one of its expected recommendations by saying it was ready for talks...

WASHINGTON - The Iraq Study Group report delivered to President Bush yesterday contains 79 separate recommendations - but not one that explains how American forces can defeat the terrorist insurgents, only ways to bring the troops home. Declaring the situation "grave and deteriorating," the high-powered commission proposed the United States talk directly to terror abettors Iran and Syria to get their cooperation, and commit to removing U.S. combat troops in early 2008. In a major policy report presented to Bush and Congress, the panel also recommended taking a harder line with the fledgling Iraqi government by threatening to reduce or...

RUSH: We will start with the Iraq surrender group, big press conference today chaired by Lee Hamilton and James Baker. I think one of the best ways to share with you my thoughts on this is to read to you an e-mail I got from an Air Force friend of mine, a veteran in Iraq watching this this morning. "Hey, Rush, I'm climbing out of my skin here, watching the Iraq surrender group unfold on TV, but they're missing the point. Iraq is not the problem. The hatred our enemy has for us, that's the problem. Iraq is only a...

Isn’t the main problem with the Iraq Study Group that it’s just majorly lame? Almost anybody could crank out this kind of generalized boilerplate (“We were told by a general/a translator/my taxi driver/my Ukrainian hooker…”), and most of us could do it without a budget of gazillions of dollars and an Annie Leibovitz photo session. Of course, Syria “should” do this and Iran “should” do that and, if they were Sandra Day O’Connor, I’m sure they would. But they’re not. And the only specific strategic proposal is a linkage between Iraq and a “renewed and sustained commitment” to a “comprehensive...

Iraq: A panel notable for its total absence of military expertise is set to recommend "redeploying" U.S. forces in Iraq. Someone ought to remind James Baker that George W. Bush is commander in chief and he isn't. 'According to people familiar with the panel's deliberations," reports the New York Times, the Iraq Study Group, composed of such great military minds as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Clinton political operative Vernon Jordan, agreed Wednesday on recommending to President Bush a gradual pullout of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq beginning next year. The ISG panel also...

On Wednesday, an unelected, unaccountable and substantially unqualified commission will formally report what hasn’t already been leaked about its recommendations with respect to the conflict in Iraq. The title of the commission is the Iraq Study Group (ISG). Given the nature of its contribution, a better name would be the Iraq Surrender Group.* Led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the ISG’s members have reportedly decided that the United States must withdraw its forces from Iraq, that we must start doing so in substantial numbers by 2008 and that we have to open negotiations...

A call for President George W. Bush to reduce US support to Iraq if Baghdad fails to improve security drew a sour response from Iraqi politicians, who said Washington had an obligation to back their government. "The US calls itself an occupying force in Iraq and, according to the Geneva Conventions, if you are an occupier then you are responsible for the country," said parliamentarian Mahmud Othman, a Kurd. "They have no right to to do this. This is unfair." Bassim Ridha, a top advisor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said the White House has to support Baghdad "all the...