A Perfect Failure
EDITORIAL A Perfect Failure In the frenzied final week of the Iraq Study Group's deliberations, co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton took time out to pose for a photo spread for a fashion...
...Robert Kagan and William Kristol...
...The decision of how far, how fast, and even whether to withdraw will rest with military commanders in Iraq, who will base their determination on how well prepared the Iraqis are to take over...
...They have to do something to distract attention from two unpleasant facts...
...He gave no indication that he was willing to begin direct talks with Syria on Iraq...
...At the same time, we were struck by exit polls that showed the public was equally concerned with a too precipitous pullout from Iraq, suggesting the American people know quite well what is at stake in the war there...
...But as with all similar plans previously devised by the Pentagon, the timing, according to the Washington Post's sources, "would be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable, predicated on the assumption that circumstances on the ground would permit it...
...He intends to pursue steadfastly his own course in Iraq...
...If not, no matter how strong a position he has constitutionally, he will not be able to sustain his Iraq policy...
...As the New York Times put it, they represent "a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March...
...Unfortunately, and dangerously, the president appears to have largely lost their confidence...
...In that, the commission has failed...
...forces in Baghdad and throughout the contested parts of the country, as well as a long overdue increase in the total size of American ground forces so that higher force levels in Iraq can be sustained...
...Many Americans, it would seem, are still open to a plan for Iraq that has a chance of working—if the president acts soon...
...For the Iraq Study Group, aided by supportive American media, has successfully conveyed the impression to everyone at home and abroad that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq...
...The "wise men" who counseled Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam and the members of the Kissinger Commission who tried to reshape Ronald Reagan's Central American policies did not sit for Annie Leibovitz in the middle of their endeavors...
...So now here comes the Iraq Study Group suggesting that the present force of about 140,000 should be reduced to around 70,000 by early 2008...
...This the Iranians have steadfastly refused to do, of course...
...But "this business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all...
...Nor did they hire a mega-public relations firm to sell their recommendations (supposedly intended for the president) to the public at large, as Baker and Hamilton have done...
...It's not as if the Baker commission has accomplished nothing, however...
...There is another problem for Baker, of course, which justifies the money the commission is spending to hire the Edelman public relations firm...
...But we think the chairmen's self-promotion and big-time product marketing are perfectly understandable...
...We remain dissatisfied with the way the president has allowed his Pentagon and top military officers to persist in what has proved to be an ineffective strategy in Iraq...
...Yet there is one "power broker" that still matters: the American public...
...This might seem a dubious decision given the gravity of the moment and their self-appointed roles as the nation's saviors...
...Certainly, the election results were a strong signal that Americans are unhappy with the war in Iraq...
...This time last year, defense officials announced their intention to reduce the force of 150,000 to well under 100,000 by the end of 2006...
...Now it will require enormous efforts by the president and his advisers to dispel the disastrous impression that the Baker commission has quite deliberately created and will continue to foster in the weeks ahead...
...In the past, Pentagon desires to draw down the force foundered precisely because "circumstances on the ground" did not permit a reduction of American forces...
...Everyone felt good about where we ended up," said another...
...But reaching consensus among the 10 members of the group was presumably not the primary goal of this exercise...
...forces substantially...
...The first is that after nine months of deliberation and an unprecedented build-up of expectations that these sages would produce some brilliant, original answer to the Iraq conundrum, the study group's recommendations turn out to be a pallid and muddled reiteration of what most Democrats, many Republicans, and even Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officials have been saying for almost two years...
...To say that this is not a new idea is an understatement...
...He will not be buffeted by conventional wisdom or by Baker and his colleagues, no matter how much they employ public relations tactics to defeat him...
...Happily, that is not the case...
...We hope that he will now take the steps necessary to accomplish his stated objectives in Iraq, including a substantial increase in the number of U.S...
...EDITORIAL A Perfect Failure In the frenzied final week of the Iraq Study Group's deliberations, co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton took time out to pose for a photo spread for a fashion magazine, Men's Vogue...
...We're happy for them...
...One commission source declared, "We reached a consensus, which in itself is remarkable...
...Although neither the American media nor many observers of the American political scene seem to realize it, there is nothing the Baker commission can do to force Bush to take a different course than the one he chooses...
...Donald Rumsfeld and top military officials have from the beginning of the occupation three years ago aimed to do precisely what the Baker-Hamilton group now recommends...
...The goal will be to hand over responsibility for security in Iraq to the Iraqis themselves as soon as this is feasible, and to shift the American role to training rather than fighting the insurgency and providing security...
...The idea was to provide usable advice for the Bush administration that would help it move toward an acceptable outcome in Iraq...
...Nor is it easy for a Democratic majority in Congress to call the shots in Iraq...
...President Bush clearly does...
...But, of course, the Baker plan will face the same challenges as all previous such suggestions...
...I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq," he told reporters...
...It is that the Baker commission report is, as the press likes to say, dead on arrival...
...As for Syria, Bush continues to accuse Syria, rightly, of trying to retake control of Lebanon by means of assassination and support of terrorist violence...
...Despite efforts to make it appear otherwise, then, the real recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is "stay the course...
...For this we waited nine months...
...He is determined not to withdraw before it becomes stable and, yes, democratic...
...In the American system, the president always has enormous authority in foreign policy, if he wants to exercise it...
...This has weakened American allies and strengthened American enemies...
...Every year since, the Pentagon has aimed to reduce U.S...
...In Estonia last Tuesday, the president said, "Iran knows how to get to the table with us, and that is to do that which they said they would do, which is verifiably suspend their [uranium] enrichment programs...
...Even after the withdrawal, the study group envisions keeping at least 70,000 American troops in Iraq for years to come...
...Over the course of the past few weeks, and especially this past week, President Bush has made clear that he has no intention of following the commission's recommendations...
...Thus, according to at least six separate commission sources sent out to pre-spin the press, the Baker-Hamilton report will call for a gradual and partial withdrawal of American forces in Iraq, to begin at a time unspecified and to be completed by a time unspecified...
...In 2003, the Pentagon set a goal of reducing the forces from 130,000 to 30,000 by the end of the year, handing responsibility for Iraq to the newly formed Iraqi army...
...It has exacerbated the problems in Iraq, as all the various factions in that country begin to prepare for the "inevitable" American retreat...
...At home and abroad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on...
...One of the more striking aspects of the Iraq Study Group's report is that these recommendations are clearly not anyone's idea of the right plan...
...As for Baker's other significant and more original recommendation—that the United States hold direct talks with Iran and Syria to get their help in Iraq—Bush nixed that idea, too...
...Although its recommendations will have no effect on American policy going forward, they have already had a very damaging effect throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East and in Iraq...
...But right now we can only applaud the president's courage and determination and his willingness to resist the pressures of those who would now sound the retreat...
...As Democratic senator Jack Reed noted, the group's recommendations repeat "what some of us have been saying for a while...
...In his press conference with the Iraqi prime minister this past Thursday, Bush took a direct slap at the Iraq Study Group...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 13
