Fred Barnes writes a comprehensive account of President Bush’s decision-making process for the surge. To Bush haters, he’ll always be a bumbling moron or a puppet.

History will prove otherwise. As for John McCain’s contention that he pushed hard for the change in tactics in Iraq, he is right.

The date: December 13, 2006. The location: a windowless conference room in the Pentagon known as the Tank. It was an inauspicious place for President Bush to confront the last major obstacle to the most important decision of his second term, perhaps of his entire presidency. And the president chose not to deal with his hosts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a commander in chief would address subordinates. He hadn’t come to the military brass’s turf simply to order the five chiefs and two combatant commanders to begin a “surge” of additional troops in Iraq and to pursue a radical change in strategy. For that, he might have summoned them to the Oval Office or the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. He had come to the Pentagon to persuade and cajole, not command.

The president was in a weak and lonely position. After Republicans lost the Senate and House in the midterm election on November 7, nearly 200 members of Congress had met with him at the White House, mostly to grouse about Iraq. Democrats urged him to begin withdrawing troops, in effect accepting defeat. Many of the Republicans were panicky and blamed Bush and the Iraq war for the Democratic landslide. They feared the 2008 election would bring worse losses. They wanted out of Iraq too.

I found this interesting. In June 2006:

To stimulate fresh consideration of Iraq strategy, the NSC staff organized a panel of experts to address the president and his war cabinet at Camp David in mid-June. The two-day meeting at the presidential retreat loomed as a potential turning point in the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq.

The four-man panel wasn’t stacked. Kagan spoke in favor of additional troops and outlined his plan for pacifying Baghdad with a “clear, hold, and build” strategy. American soldiers, along with Iraqi troops, would do the holding, living in Baghdad and guarding its citizens, Sunni and Shia alike. Robert Kaplan, the foreign correspondent and military writer now teaching at the Naval Academy, talked about successful counterinsurgency campaigns in the past. (Kaplan’s books are among Bush’s favorites.) Kaplan neither advocated a troop buildup nor opposed it.

When reading Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, I kept thinking that Bush needed to read that book, especially the chapter on how General Pershing fought a counter-insurgency campaing in the Phillipines at the turn of the 20th century.

Indeed, Bush had read it and was smart enough to pick the brain of a journalist for The Atlantic.