President Bush won his first skirmish with the Iraq Study Group. James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the ISG directors, insisted the president adopt all 79 of its recommendations for changing policy in Iraq. Bush balked, and for good reason. A sizable chunk of the ISG's advice--its call, for instance, for a new diplomatic outreach to Syria and Iran--is unrealistic and wrongheaded. Within 24 hours of the report's release, Hamilton conceded he and Baker had never expected full compliance by Bush.

It was, however, a small triumph. The president faces significant hurdles in his effort to finesse the ISG report and the get-out-of-Iraq-now Democrats. Bush's plan is twofold. First, while praising the ISG report, he's already begun rejecting parts he doesn't like, while other parts he'll probably just ignore. Second, to quell Democratic (and media) opposition, he'll invoke the ISG's plea for bipartisanship and its support for "success" in Iraq.

Bush would no doubt have preferred to dismiss the report flatly, perhaps even contemptuously. He came to Washington six years ago with a strong desire to thumb his nose at the mandarins of the Washington establishment. And the ISG is a perfect embodiment of that establishment both in who's on it and the type of advice it's offering. But given his political weakness and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Bush doesn't have the option of snubbing the ISG.

Still, the private scorn among Bush aides for the ISG was hard to disguise. One administration official said a line in Eliot Cohen's

Fatuous or not, the ISG's recommendations were typical of Washington's elite class of former officials. The ISG's ten members showed a utopian faith in diplomacy and negotiations, plus a fondness for regional conferences, especially dealing with the Middle East. They suggested, subtly but surely, that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is somehow relevant to fixing what's wrong in Iraq and should be dealt with as one of the first orders of business. And, as Washington elites always do, they favored bipartisanship and a consensus approach. In fact, ISG members were downright self-congratulatory in talking about how well they got along with each other, in contrast to the partisanship that otherwise prevails in Washington.

The conceit of the panel was that Washington's wise men would bail out an unsophisticated president from the consequences of his reckless intervention in Iraq that many of them, Baker included, opposed from the start. A further conceit was that a collection of old Washington hands, regardless of their specific qualifications, invariably knows better.

In a sense, the ISG report was payback. The group embraced the conventional wisdom in Washington that Bush has so often rebelled against. The emphasis of his foreign and national security policy on spreading democracy clashed with the establishment's yearning for stability. Thus it's not surprising the ISG report never cites "democracy" as a goal. But "stability" or a "stable" Iraq as an objective is cited more than 30 times.