Iraq report confronts Bush resolve

In addition to studies anticipated from the Pentagon and the National Security Council, Bush has also received recently at least two detailed memos – from Mr. Hadley and outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – offering analysis and recommendations that emphasize the need for deep policy changes to alter Iraq's downward spiral.

Those two memos in particular have shifted the political ground for Bush as he awaits what was already expected to be a week of pressure for change with the release of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations.

"The flow of calls to reconsider Iraq policy means the context is very different – and more intense," says Mr. Alterman, a former State Department policy planning staff member in the president's first term. "After the Hadley and Rumsfeld memos, this would be the third call in a week saying: 'You really have to consider alternatives' – and to a president who has made clear he doesn't want to consider alternatives."

Given the high profile the Iraq Study Group has achieved, the White House won't be able to brush it off. At the same time, it will not want it to appear that the president is hanging on its every word, former presidential advisers say.

"We can anticipate that the [Baker] report will offer such a number of nuanced statements that it will permit reading into it what you want to see," says Geoffrey Kemp, an expert in security issues at the Nixon Center in Washington who was on the national security staff of the Reagan White House. "It will be difficult for the president to dismiss it, but ... neither will [Bush] want to look as if he is waiting, hat in hand, for its recommendations."

Given those dual pressures, Mr. Kemp says he expects the White House to "take some time to digest what the study group has to say," and then to incorporate those aspects it agrees with into its new policy.

"I think [Bush] will use Baker-Hamilton to bolster his case where he can," Kemp says.

For example, Kemp says he now sees as practically written in stone a significant drawdown of US troops over the coming year.

But some analysts expect Bush to announce in the coming weeks an actual increase in US troops patrolling the Iraqi capital. If that happens, the president can be expected to announce such a decision as a short-term necessity for achieving the long-term goal of "withdrawing US troops and putting the Iraqis in control of their destiny," Kemp says.

White House political calculations will play a role in how it responds, others say.

"Remember this is not a nonpartisan commission, it is bipartisan," Alterman says. "So it will be looking at political outcomes as much as at outcomes on the grounds in Iraq."

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