Bush STILL Insists on "Victory" in Iraq

WASHINGTON - Administration officials say their preliminary review of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's recommendations has concluded that many of its key proposals are impractical or unrealistic, and a small group inside the National Security Council is now racing to come up with alternatives to the panel's ideas.

In interviews over the last two days with officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and foreign diplomats, Bush and his top aides were described as deeply reluctant to follow the core strategy advocated by the study group: to pressure Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki to rein in sectarian violence faced with reduced U.S. 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 Bush and to the public on Wednesday.

"You saw that the president used the word victory' again the next day," said one of Bush's aides. "Believe me, that was no accident."

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