Crafting an Iraq Plan

Bush Aide Has Low Profile, High Influence

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush addresses the nation tonight, the strategies he offers for Iraq will represent months of work by J.D. Crouch, an academic turned deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Crouch, who once led graduate students on hikes, now aims to chart a new path to stabilize Iraq. He will see his belief in American military power reflected in the president's expected call to send tens of thousands of additional U.S. combat personnel to Iraq. The 48-year-old volunteer sheriff has been an advocate of the so-called surge of new troops to Iraq, administration officials said. In addition to the call for new troops, aides said tomorrow Mr. Bush also will seek a U.S.-funded effort to spur job creation and economic growth in Iraq.

The president and senior officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are the administration's public face when it comes to foreign policy. But as in other policy arenas, the crafting of specific proposals falls to mid-level aides like Mr. Crouch. Although few in Washington know his name, Mr. Crouch has become one of the most influential figures in the administration when it comes to Iraq, the signature issue of Mr. Bush's presidency.

"He has what is definitely an inside job," said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Mr. Crouch's boss. "But if you care about the nuts-and-bolts of policy making -- and he does -- it's an important position to hold."

Mr. Crouch, who declined to comment for this article, received a doctorate in international relations from University of Southern California.

He came to Washington to work as an officer in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration. When George H.W. Bush became president, Mr. Crouch moved to the Pentagon, where he was deputy to Mr. Hadley, then an assistant secretary of defense. By the early 1990s, Mr. Crouch was ready for a change. When his mentor at USC, William Van Cleave, offered him a tenure-track position at Southwest Missouri State University, Mr. Crouch accepted. Mr. Crouch was asked to return to Washington after George W. Bush took office in 2001. But his nomination as Mr. Bush's assistant secretary of defense for international security policy set off fireworks on Capitol Hill, where Democrats derided Mr. Crouch as a conservative ideologue during his confirmation hearing.

The Democrats expressed alarm over an academic article he wrote in 1995 that called for dispatching more troops to South Korea, redeploying American tactical nuclear weapons to the country, and bombing North Korea if Pyongyang refused to abandon its nuclear program. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described Mr. Crouch's North Korea proposals as "reckless."

Mr. Van Cleave said the portrait painted by Democrats at the hearing was unfair. "J.D. has principles about national security: He recognizes that arms-control agreements haven't always worked well, that American strength depends on our military power, and that there are times when we need to use the military," Mr. Van Cleave said. "But those aren't 'radical' positions. The only thing he's fanatical about is USC football."

Mr. Crouch was ultimately confirmed by the Senate, and served in the Pentagon for two years before Mr. Bush named him ambassador to Romania. Mr. Crouch returned to the White House in January 2005 after Mr. Hadley asked him to serve as his deputy, and has since been in the catbird seat on a range of key national security issues.

Last fall, Mr. Hadley asked Mr. Crouch to lead an internal administration review to identify weaknesses in current U.S. policy on Iraq and to propose ways to fix them.

Mr. Crouch assembled a team of 12 midlevel aides from the Pentagon, State and Treasury departments, intelligence community, and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Members of the panel included Meghan L. O'Sullivan, deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and John Hannah, Mr. Cheney's national security adviser.

The team began a review of the situation in Iraq. Mr. Bush wanted to sit down with senior members of his national security team the Sunday after Thanksgiving to discuss what Mr. Hadley describes as "the general contours of the way forward in Iraq," so the team met daily through November.

The panel, which held face-to-face meetings and regular videoconferences with senior U.S. commanders in Baghdad, quickly came to two conclusions about Iraq: that the situation in Iraq was dire and deteriorating, and that there weren't enough U.S. military personnel in the country to stabilize the country, said participants in Mr. Crouch's review.

The panelists had a harder time reaching consensus on how to move forward in Iraq. Participants said they considered, and rejected, an array of possible policy shifts. One idea that was ultimately discarded was the "80-percent" solution, which called for the U.S. to abandon its outreach efforts to Iraqi Sunnis and instead focus on the country's Shiites and Kurds, who together comprise about 80% of the country's 26 million residents.

Mr. Hadley said the U.S. decided to instead redouble efforts to build a coalition of moderate political figures from all three sectarian groups. This idea, along with the troop surge and the new economic-growth initiative, will be among the main themes of Mr. Bush's speech to the nation this week, other administration officials said.