That Iraq Report? More of the Same
The great Baker-Hamilton crock: A classic bullshit-cloud in the proud tradition of congressional "studies"

Baker-Hamilton was a classic whore-panel in every sense. None were Middle East experts. None had logged serious time in Iraq, before or after the invasion. All of them had influential friends on both sides of the aisle all over Washington, parties in the future they wanted to keep getting invites to, ambitions yet to be realized. You could assign Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, Sandra Day O'Connor and Vernon Jordan, Jr. to take on virtually any problem and feel very confident that between the four of them, they would find a way to avoid the ugly heart of any serious political dilemma. If the missiles were on the way, and nuclear Armageddon was just seconds off, those four fossils would find a way to issue a recommendation whose headline talking points would be something like "heightened caution," dialogue with Sweden, and a 14 percent increase in future funding for the Air Force. Hence the conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report were predetermined virtually from the start. We could all have expected that the group's only unequivocal conclusions would restate the obvious -- that we need an eventual withdrawal of troops, that there needs to be more "robust regional diplomacy," that Iraqi forces need to assume more of the security burden, and that there will be no hope of a political solution without some cooperation from Syria and Iran. Duh! Because the really thorny questions are the specifics: when do we leave, and, more importantly, what do we offer Iran and Syria in return for their cooperation, what horrifying inevitable humiliation will we be prepared to suffer at their hands, and what form will talks with those gloating countries take? Baker-Hamilton blew off those questions, and it's no wonder, because no one in Washington wants to deal with them. The Republicans don't want to agree to a withdrawal timetable because it's an admission of defeat and policy failure, while the Democrats don't want to be the first to call for a withdrawal because they're afraid of being pilloried in the next election season for a lack of toughness. Both sides are afraid of being responsible for a civil war bloodbath if the U.S. troops pull out, and neither side wants to be the first to suggest taking the humiliating step of inviting Syria or Iran to the negotiating table with anything like equal status.

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  thanks to The Agonist

A New U.S. Option in Iraq: Panic!

Things really are coming apart so quickly in Iraq that some blogging appears to be in order. No sooner had we noted that Washington’s Arab allies are pushing it hard to remain engaged and protect the Sunnis then the Washington Post reports (thanks, Pat!) that the State Department has been pushing for the U.S. to abandon its efforts to draw the Sunni insurgents into a new political order because that is alienating the Shiites — and as I noted below, it’s untenable for the U.S. military to remain in Iraq if it is at odds with two thirds of the population. The proposal to ditch efforts to draw in the Baathists is attributed to Philip Zelikow, which makes the fact that he resigned last week all the more intriguing. It’s not hard to imagine that the bomb-Iran faction of the Administration is having none of this cozying up to the Shiites business, and Dick Cheney’s huddle with the Saudi king last weekend would certainly have been about mobilizing an alliance of Sunni regimes to push back against Iranian influence both inside Iraq and beyond.

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Bush, Baker and Iraq: Why the Patient Can Not Be Saved

Discussing the report of his bipartisan Iraq Study Group with the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, former Secretary of State and Bush-pere fixer James Baker must have already sensed the inevitability that nothing will come of his efforts to salvage the mess young Bush has made in Iraq: “I hope we don’t treat this like a fruit salad, saying, ‘I like this, but I don’t like that,’ ” Baker told the senators, to warn them away from their own line-item-veto approach to it. “It’s a comprehensive strategy designed to deal with the problems in Iraq, but also to deal with other problems in the region. These are interdependent recommendations.” Not according to President Bush, who told a news conference the same day he was sure Baker and Lee Hamilton didn’t expect him to embrace all of their recommendations. He also made it abundantly clear that some of its most important proposals are to his tastes what broccoli was to his father’s. Exhibit A: Talks with Iran and Syria over Iraq — Bush made clear he had no intention of following that one. (Instead, he reiterated his preconditions for allowing Iran and Syria to help the U.S. out in Iraq! Uh, I think you may want to think in terms of incentives; they’re the ones who’re going to have the preconditions, Mr. President…) That position is likely to be reinforced by such head-in-sand hawks as Cheney and the plays-one-on-TV grand strategist Condi Rice, fiercely egged on by the Israel-first crowd, who see any rapprochement between Washington and either Tehran or Damascus as a danger to be aggressively countered. And the commonsense linkage made by Baker-Hamilton between prospects for success in Iraq and in the wider Middle East showing U.S. willingness to act in an even-handed way between Israel and the Palestinians, first and foremost by forcing them back to the peace table, is, predictably, being hysterically denounced Likud’s American cheering section. Then again, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is so confident that Bush won’t change his position on Iran and Syria that he told his cabinet to keep mum on the issue, lest they make it look as if Israel is inappropriately intervening.

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The Children's Crusade/Thirty Years War

David Brooks tells us today that American withdrawal from Iraq will leave a disrupted region in such a state that a general regional war initially centered in Iraq will result and he compares that coming war to the "Thirty Years War" which devastated much of Europe causing a loss of 50% of the population in some places. I support this analysis whether he likes that or not. I differ from him in two areas that are at least implied by lacunae in his screed. 1 - He shows no evidence of thinking that the situation in Iraq has passed beyond American ability to control events at the macro level. It is over, David, just over... No amount of blather can change that. Partition Iraq? Hah!! Iraq is well on its way to completing its own partition. Ethnic cleansing is underway throughout the country, neighborhood fights neighborhood throughout Baghdad while the Kurds look on with apprehension over American reliability. It is over. We should now look to our options in dealing with the wreckage of Mesopotamia and the "cockpit" into which we have made the Middle East. Immediate withdrawal? Not unless it is part of the answer in dealing with the wreckage. More trainers and advisers? Perhaps, if we think that reasonable relations with the Shia "rump" state of Iraq will be sufficiently important in the context of the "Second Thirty Years War" to warrant the expenditure in blood and money and the risks inherent in maintaining a smaller and therefore more vulnerable force in Iraq.

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The Baker Boys: Stay Half the Course
Iraq Study Group or Saudi Protection League?
by Greg Palast

They’re kidding, right? James Baker III and the seven dwarfs of the “Iraq Study Group” have come up with some simply brilliant recommendations. Not. Baker’s Two Big Ideas are: 1. Stay half the course. Keeping 140,000 troops in Iraq is a disaster getting more disastrous. The Baker Boys’ idea: cut the disaster in half — leave 70,000 troops there. But here’s where dumb gets dumber: the Bakerites want to “embed” US forces in Iraqi Army units. Question one, Mr. Baker: What Iraqi Army? This so-called “army” is a rough confederation of Shia death squads. We can tell our troops to get “embedded” with them, but the Americans won’t get much sleep.

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  thanks to David Iles

Will Bush choose his new friends over his old?
The president's Shiite allies in Iraq really don't like some of James Baker's Sunni-friendly suggestions.
By Juan Cole

At a press conference on Thursday, George Bush was asked whether he was "in denial" about Iraq. "It's bad in Iraq," he shot back, to laughter. "That help?" He also noted that the report of the Jim Baker-led Iraq Study Group, which was released Wednesday, was important enough that he had read it. But the immediate speculation in Washington was that even if the president has really accepted that things are "bad," it doesn't mean he's ready to follow the ISG's advice on how to make things better. Some wondered which prescriptions he would ignore, while others suggested he might be trying to sabotage the ISG's suggested remedies altogether.

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