Taking a look at the front page of tomorrow's issue of The Washington Post I see there is an article by reporter Michael Abramowitz on the perceived resurgence of the ideas put forth by the Iraq Study Group. According to Abramowitz, even President Bush is embracing the ISG report. Well, sort of.

After an initially tepid reception from policymakers, the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are getting a second look from the White House and Congress, as officials continue to scour for bipartisan solutions to salvage the American engagement in Iraq.

[...]

"I liked what James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton suggested," Bush said in East Grand Rapids, Mich., last month. "And that is to be in a position at some point in time where our troops are embedded with the Iraqi units -- in other words, there's Iraqi units providing security with a handful of U.S. troops -- helping them learn what it means to be a good military."

Such comments highlight an evolution in administration attitudes toward the study group, which delivered its recommendations to the White House along with a withering critique of administration Iraq policy.

It truly amazes me that there are people -- particularly people inside the Beltway who purport to watch politics closely -- who still believe that President Bush will ever be willing to budge one inch from his position on Iraq, that regardless of anything there will be at least a hundred thousand American troops on the ground in the country when he leaves office in January 2009. Perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised, though. After all, it's only been a week since the last time I took Abramowitz to task over his reporting on the White House's Iraq policy, when he implied that Congressional Democrats were negotiating in poor faith with the Bush administration when the opposite was quite clearly more of the case.

But even getting past this particular Post reporter, this story provides yet another example of the establishment media allowing itself to be bamboozled by the President over Iraq. There are simply too many previous instances of this trend to recall here in this post, but just since the end of the year many in the media have failed to comprehend that the real reason behind President Bush's escalation policy is to enable him to keep American forces in Iraq for at least two to three more years. This fact was hammered home again this month when the military all but admitted that they will push forward with the escalation through at least the middle of next year regardless of the planned assessment of the policy this September.

If I haven't said it clearly enough, my apologies. President Bush intends to stay in Iraq for the duration of his term in office and will say just about anything -- including that he is rethinking his opposition to the ISG report -- to achieve this goal.