What Bush wants, Bush gets: complete control of the timing of the Iraq War.

“I think everyone felt good about where we ended up,” one person involved in the commission’s debates said after the group ended its meeting. “It is neither ‘cut and run’ nor ‘stay the course.’ ”

“Those who favor immediate withdrawal will not like it,” he said, but it also “deviates significantly from the president’s strategy.”

The report also would offer military commanders — and therefore the president — great flexibility to determine the timing and phasing of the pullback of the combat brigades.

Throughout the debates, Mr. Baker, who served as secretary of state under Mr. Bush’s father and was the central figure in developing the strategy to win the 2000 Florida recount for Mr. Bush, was highly reluctant to allow a timetable for withdrawal to be included in the report, participants said.

Mr. Baker cited what Mr. Bush had also called a danger: that any firm deadline would be an invitation to insurgents and sectarian groups to bide their time until the last American troops were withdrawn, then seek to overthrow the government. But Democrats on the commission also suspected that Mr. Baker was reluctant to embarrass the president by embracing a strategy Mr. Bush had repeatedly rejected.

Committee members struggled with ways, short of a deadline, to signal to the Iraqis that Washington would not prop up the government with military forces endlessly, and that if sectarian warfare continued the pressure to withdraw American forces would become overwhelming. What they ended up with appears to be a classic Washington compromise: a report that sets no explicit timetable but, between the lines, appears to have one built in.

As one senior American military officer involved in Iraq strategy said, “The question is whether it doesn’t look like a timeline to Bush, and does to Maliki.”

First, military commanders can’t overrule Bush.

Second, catering to Bush is a continuation of the ’spoil the brat’ strategy of parenting that has made him stomp his feet around the globe saying: “I want, I Want, I WANT !!!”

Third, the American political schedule will trump this plan, forcing most troops to be withdrawn within 22 months.

Fourth, Iraqi militias, will trump that political schedule, as will mass protests of the Iraqi people. At least 1,000 US troops will die that didn’t need to.

The bottom line? The Study Group passed the ball to Shia militias. It amounts to too little too late. And the next 14 months will be especially bloody. The Iraq public and the American public will compel the decisions of the politicians, especially if half the troops aren’t pulled by next summer.

And the genius of James Baker, like that of Karl Rove, will fade in mythology, dispelled by the blood on the ground.

Update: Harold Meyerson describes the reality quite well.