The chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday denied a newspaper report that he will urge President George W. Bush to cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq next year.

"The story is wrong," Marine Gen. Peter Pace said through a spokesman. "It is speculative. I have not made nor decided on any recommendations yet."

The Los Angeles Times, citing military and administration officials, said on Friday that Pace was expected to contend that keeping significantly more than 100,000 troops in Iraq through next year would severely strain the military and compromise its ability to respond to other threats.

The CNN article yesterday, citing an anonymous Bush source, claimed that "White House officials are not privately involved or blessing the lobbying campaign to undermine al-Maliki." CNN quoted the official: "There's just no connection whatsoever. There's absolutely no involvement."

But Zelikow, at least, now seems to have some official role in forming Bush policy on Iraq. Zelikow was originally scheduled to testify about the Future of Iraq at a July 18 hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, but on the day of the hearing, the Subcommittee's Chairman, Vic Snyder, announced (via LEXIS):

We also had originally scheduled Dr. Philip Zelikow, who had worked with Secretary Rice I think from 1905 -- I'm sorry, 2005 to 2007. I want to just touch on these details for a minute. A very smart guy, we were looking forward to him being here. He had finalized his written statement with the staff on late Monday afternoon. It was distributed to all our members on Tuesday morning and sometime in mid-morning, we received a call from his assistant that he would have to cancel.

I put in a call to him to try to get him to change his mind. It turned out he called back later that day and informed us that somewhere in that intervening time the administration had approached him about being a consultant with the administration and work on Iraq war policy. And he didn't think it was appropriate for him to be testifying publicly.

At least according to what Zelikow told Chairman Snyder, "the administration had approached him about being a consultant with the administration and work on Iraq war policy." Although it is unclear if he accepted, one can presume that he did, since he cited that formal consulting relationship with the Bush administration as the reason why it was now inappropriate for him to testify in public about Iraq. Is Zelikow formally working with his old administration colleagues to form Iraq policy while being paid by Ayad Allawi to restore him back to power?

It really is very strange how all of Official Washington, seemingly at the same time, collectively decided to turn on Prime Minister Maliki -- who, after all, was elected democratically and was the leader in whom we were placing all of our hopes for progress in Iraq. Obviously, there is a very potent and well-funded effort to induce exactly that policy change at the highest levels of Republican power.