Stay the Course

In the NYTimes this morning, "senoir administration officials," presumably "including people in the National Security Council and the vice president’s office" push back hard against the ISG report.

"In interviews over the last two days with officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and foreign diplomats, President Bush and his top aides were described as deeply reluctant to follow the core strategy advocated by the study group: to pressure Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to rein in sectarian violence faced with reduced United States military and economic support.....

And they took issue with the decision by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the nine other members of the commission to make no mention of promoting democracy as an American goal in the Middle East, and to drop any suggestion that “victory” was still possible in Iraq when they presented their findings to Mr. Bush and to the public on Wednesday...."

“You saw that the president used the word ‘victory’ again the next day,” said one of Mr. Bush’s aides. “Believe me, that was no accident.”

Read: Stay the Course.