Baker a la Carte
BARNES, FRED
Baker a la Carte How Bush will pick and choose from the 79 varieties of recommendation. by Fred Barnes President Bush won his first skirmish with the Iraq Study Group. James A. Baker III and Lee...
...One administration official said a line in Eliot Cohen's analysis of the ISG report in the Wall Street Journal captured his view...
...But given his political weakness and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Bush doesn't have the option of snubbing the ISG...
...The president faces significant hurdles in his effort to finesse the ISG report and the get-out-of-Iraq-now Democrats...
...It means, in Iraq, the defeat of terrorists and antidemocratic forces...
...The group embraced the conventional wisdom in Washington that Bush has so often rebelled against...
...Thus it's not surprising the ISG report never cites "democracy" as a goal...
...But "stability" or a "stable" Iraq as an objective is cited more than 30 times...
...Bush would no doubt have preferred to dismiss the report flatly, perhaps even contemptuously...
...You probably won't find 'civil war' in here either...
...In fact, ISG members were downright self-congratulatory in talking about how well they got along with each other, in contrast to the partisanship that otherwise prevails in Washington...
...He came to Washington six years ago with a strong desire to thumb his nose at the mandarins of the Washington establishment...
...And, as Washington elites always do, they favored bipartisanship and a consensus approach...
...That's not the path to victory or success—or to bipartisanship...
...It's important for the security of the United States and Great Britain, and it's important for the civilized world...
...He may approve a temporary increase in troops in Iraq, a step mentioned but not specifically endorsed by the ISG...
...Fatuous or not, the ISG's recommendations were typical of Washington's elite class of former officials...
...But it was quickly abandoned as a topic worth examining...
...They suggested, subtly but surely, that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is somehow relevant to fixing what's wrong in Iraq and should be dealt with as one of the first orders of business...
...We have got to start moving American troops, redeploying them out of Iraq, and start bringing them home," he said...
...Don't hold your breath...
...James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the ISG directors, insisted the president adopt all 79 of its recommendations for changing policy in Iraq...
...At a press conference last week with British prime minister Tony Blair, Bush said he and Blair "agree that victory in Iraq is important...
...Victory is far less equivocal...
...And while the ISG endorsed an Iraq that can govern and defend itself and join the international war on terror, it failed to provide a strategy for achieving that goal...
...The ISG's ten members showed a utopian faith in diplomacy and negotiations, plus a fondness for regional conferences, especially dealing with the Middle East...
...A further conceit was that a collection of old Washington hands, regardless of their specific qualifications, invariably knows better...
...First, while praising the ISG report, he's already begun rejecting parts he doesn't like, while other parts he'll probably just ignore...
...It's important for the Iraqi people...
...Still, the private scorn among Bush Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Next week Bush intends to address the nation with "a new approach" in Iraq...
...He'll invoke the Iraq Study Group and accept many of its recommendations...
...In a sense, the ISG report was payback...
...A telling difference between the president and the ISG involves "victory" as the chief aim in Iraq...
...Baker explained the absence of the word this way: "We stayed away from a lot of terms that have been bandied about during the campaign season and the political debate...
...And the word victory itself did not appear in the report except in reference to a possible al Qaeda victory...
...A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results," wrote Cohen, a military expert at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies...
...You won't find 'victory.' But you will find 'success.' And so I think what our report says, on balance, if you read it, is that if you implement the recommendations we make, the chances for success in Iraq will be improved...
...A sizable chunk of the ISG's advice—its call, for instance, for a new diplomatic outreach to Syria and Iran—is unrealistic and wrongheaded...
...According to the Washington Post, "victory in Iraq" was initially one of four options that the ISG would explore...
...Will this cause Durbin and antiwar Democrats to desist...
...Bush balked, and for good reason...
...The difference between success and victory is more than symbolic...
...The conceit of the panel was that Washington's wise men would bail out an unsophisticated president from the consequences of his reckless intervention in Iraq that many of them, Baker included, opposed from the start...
...After congressional leaders met with Bush last week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said withdrawing troops from Iraq has to be the top priority...
...Bush's plan is twofold...
...The trickiest part of Bush's plan is getting Democrats to live up to their promise to be bipartisan...
...Within 24 hours of the report's release, Hamilton conceded he and Baker had never expected full compliance by Bush...
...aides for the ISG was hard to disguise...
...And the ISG is a perfect embodiment of that establishment both in who's on it and the type of advice it's offering...
...It could mean diminished violence or an undemocratic takeover of the Iraqi government by a strongman or a military leader or almost anything but a total takeover by terrorists and jihad-ists...
...It was, however, a small triumph...
...Second, to quell Democratic (and media) opposition, he'll invoke the ISG's plea for bipartisanship and its support for "success" in Iraq...
...The ISG was far more interested in pointing the way for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq...
...Success is a flexible term...
...The emphasis of his foreign and national security policy on spreading democracy clashed with the establishment's yearning for stability...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 14
