President Bush said Wednesday he “probably won’t agree with every proposal” by the Iraq Study Group, but promised to give serious consideration to all 79 of the group’s recommendations.
“This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq,” Bush said in the Cabinet Room of the White House, where he met with the study group.
“It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals,” he added. “We will take every proposal seriously, and we will act in a timely fashion.”
The president was careful to praise the panel’s members, even as he reserved the right to disagree with their most contentious recommendations.
Those include proposals for direct talks with Iran and the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops from Iraq by early 2008. Bush refuses to talk with Iran until it renounces nuclear weapons and has ruled out a specific timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the administration was not ready to fully respond to all the report’s recommendations.
“I’m not going give you a full readout on specific recommendations among the 79,” he told reporters. “Give us a couple of days to try to parse it.”
