After last month’s congressional elections a chastened President Bush promised that he was open to advice. Today the loudest voice in his ear will be that of the Iraq Study Group, which is finally publishing its “new way forward” for the war.

But, in the midst of the hyperbolic build-up for today’s 100-page report, the result of nine months’ deliberations, and the cacophony of noise coming from victorious Democrats over on Capitol Hill, President Bush has struggled to get his own message across.

The White House has been reminding anyone willing to listen that Mr Bush remains Commander-in-Chief of the US military and is, therefore, not bound to take the advice from the blue-chip group, co-chaired by the former Secretary of State James Baker and the veteran Democrat Lee Hamilton.

Indeed, he has commissioned two alternative reviews which officials say may prove to be equally, or even more, influential. One is from the Pentagon and US commanders on the ground, another is being conducted by his own National Security Council. A spokesman said yesterday that Mr Bush would not be making any decision for at least a couple of weeks.

Leaks suggest that the report is a carefully crafted compromise between Democrats and the White House, proposing a gradual drawing back of America’s 15 combat brigades from the front line, while keeping the time frame deliberately vague. But Mr Bush is uneasy about both that idea and another expected proposal about direct engagement with Iraq’s neighbours, Syria and Iran.

Israel, which still wields disproportionate influence in US politics, is strongly opposed to any rapprochement with such sponsors of terrorism. So, too, is the Saudi Government, which met Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, last week to express fears for Iraq’s Sunni minority. Mr Bush has spent much of the past week talking to Iraqi Shias such as Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the biggest party in the country’s parliament.

Should more advice be needed, Tony Blair will be arriving in Washington tonight, where he will press Mr Bush to make more effort to restart the long-stalled peace process between Israel and Palestinians.

Mr Baker and Robert Gates are foreign policy “realists” who remain closer to the first President Bush than they ever will be to the second. They stand for stability ahead of the neo-conservative ideal of building democracy across the Muslim world. But Margaret Tutwiler, who was Mr Baker’s long-term spin mistress, is among those who doubt that there is any solution, pragmatic or otherwise, for Iraq.

On a visit to Baghdad shortly after the invasion, she is said to have concluded: “Iraq was such a catastrophe that even Jim Baker would not have been able to fix it.” And that was three years ago.

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