[Rick Lee]

That could be. I never thought of that. But the article I read said Bush was caught off guard when a reporter at a WH luncheon (before his tv address) asked him if he had considered scrapping the speech, since he didn't know what Petraeus was going to say. Surely, one of Bush's advisers must have thought of that, no? And since polling after Bush's tv speech clearly shows he did not bolster support for the surge, it seems to me he and Petraeus were not really working together on this.