Bush asks his critics for ideas on Iraq

THURMONT, Md. -- Looking for new ideas on Iraq, President Bush sought advice from his critics yesterday at an unusual two-day war council.

Meeting with his senior advisers at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Bush opened the conclave with a 3 1/2-hour briefing from top US officials in Baghdad before having lunch with outside specialists who've criticized his handling of the war.

He joined his aides for more talks in the afternoon and over dinner. Today, 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 US troop levels. In fact, at least one of the specalists 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 yesterday, Kagan declined to comment on what was said there beyond, ``It was a good discussion."

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.

All four of the specialists who were invited to join Bush at his hide-away 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.

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.

Kagan has accused Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld of ``failing to focus on the war at hand" in his zeal to streamline the military.