Bush talks war at Camp David

The president takes a rare look to outside advisers.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
THURMONT, Md. -- Looking for new ideas on Iraq, President Bush sought advice from his critics Monday at an unusual two-day war council.
Closeted with his senior advisers at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Bush opened the conclave with a three-and-a-half hour briefing from top U.S. officials in Baghdad before having lunch with outside experts who've criticized his handling of the war.
He joined his aides for more talks in the afternoon and over dinner. On Tuesday, the president and his advisers will participate in a video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Cabinet in Baghdad.
Administration officials said the sessions were focused on improving security in Iraq and helping Maliki's new government succeed, not setting a timetable for reducing U.S. troop levels. In fact, at least one of the experts who met with Bush has advocated sending 77,000 more service members to join the 130,000 who are already in Iraq.
"It may be that the fastest way to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis and draw down American forces is not a steady decline of troop numbers. Instead, the fastest possible 'exit strategy' may require one last surge effort," military historian Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year.
After he left the Camp David briefing Monday, Kagan declined to comment on what was said there beyond, "It was a good discussion."
Outsiders
With his popularity declining and support for the war fading, Bush has a made an effort to reach beyond his tight-knit circle of advisers headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Still, it isn't clear how much influence outsiders have had on the president's thinking.
All four of the experts who were invited to join Bush at his hideaway in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains supported the Iraq invasion, but they haven't always been pleased with its prosecution.
In addition to Kagan, Bush heard from Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University; journalist Robert Kaplan; and former CIA officer Michael Vickers, who's now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Cohen, whose son was deployed to Iraq with the Army Rangers, has acknowledged second thoughts about his support for the war.
"What I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task," he wrote last summer in a guest column for The Washington Post. "If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed."
Kaplan's take
Kaplan has faulted Bush for failing to resolve disputes between the State Department and the Defense Department over postwar planning.
"The failure thus far to secure Iraq raises the issue -- despite the incompetence of the administration -- of whether the invasion was a flawed idea to begin with," he wrote in April for the Los Angeles Times. "Those whose task it was to plan the invasion and occupation of Iraq not only spoke in idealistic terms about the Iraqis, they apparently believed their own rhetoric to the exclusion of other, more troubling realities."
Kagan has accused Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of "failing to focus on the war at hand" in his zeal to streamline the military.
"Claims that there are no serious problems with military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or with the equipment our soldiers have, or with the number of troops available, are childish and damaging to efforts to identify and solve real problems," he wrote in January 2005.
"These problems don't result from the liberal media or the antiwar crowd making a ruckus about nothing. They result from Rumsfeld's stubborn adherence to a wrongheaded policy."