Gates is either not in favor of the troop build-up or he is guilty of one of the great flip-flops in recent DC history. Where is he on this? Is he going along with a policy that the last year of study of the situation has actually convinced him is bound to fail. Is he silently trying to upend the policy from the inside? Certainly the Post and Times reporters can tell us more on this, right?
My guess is Bush's only real elite support for escalation comes from the Quiet Americans toiling away in think tanks (Brookings, at least O'Hanlon, AND AEI support it! What a great range of debate we have in our elite discourse), and of course Darth Cheney. Still, I doubt they'll be able to talk him down either. What they might do is throw a bunch more troops into "the region" generally so they can tell him he's got his little escalation, and a few more thousand troops in Baghdad specifically, and then a year from now we can convene Iraq Survey Group II: The Nightmare Isn't Over, and do it all over again.