Eagleburger:

Minutes after the Iraq Study Group placed an improvised explosive device beneath the Bush administration's Iraq policy yesterday, panel member Lawrence Eagleburger was asked how President Bush reacted to the recommendations.

"His reaction was, 'Where's my drink?' " the former secretary of state cracked after the commission's White House visit and Capitol Hill news conference. Reaching for his own cola, Eagleburger continued: "He was a little loaded. It was early in the morning, too, you know."

The retired diplomat certainly did not mean that the president had fallen off the wagon. But if any event would call for a stiff one, this was it: A bipartisan group of elder statesmen -- some of them friends of Bush's father, no less -- had just concluded that the Iraq war, the centerpiece of Bush's presidency, was a disaster with no easy way out.