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.
But the Baker-Hamilton bashing bandwagon always has room for more: The Kurds, including President Jalal Talabani, are focusing on issues such as the report’s proposed regional strategy and restraints on “de-Baathification”, but their primary concern is that the report has blown the whistle on their de facto secession from Iraq, questioning whether it suits the wider purposes of stability in the region for the Kurds to take control of the contested oil city of Kirkuk, for example.
Some of the Shiite leaders also appear to be reluctant to embrace the idea of a regional conference, because the Shiite-Sunni balance is far more favorable to them when things are kept at home. (Iran has plenty more influence in Baghdad than does Jordan or Saudi Arabia, so they’d probably be fine with leaving the Iraqis to sort things out themselves.)
The regional strategy has been the focus of most of the criticism of Baker-Hamilton, and yet that regional strategy really is the key component of the course correction it advocates. That’s because his report is premised on the fact that the Bush Administration’s gamble in Iraq has failed dismally t — the unilateral application of America’s overwhelming military might has not created the pro-U.S., Israel-friendly regime at the heart of the Middle East that its architects imagined and hoped would provide the spark that transformed the region on the same lines. Instead, it has produced a failed state at the heart of the Middle East, and those among its political leaders who could be counted as U.S. allies have, for the most part, returned to their homes in London, while the country’s technocratic elite are emigrating in their thousands. Toppling Saddam has immeasurably strengthened Iran, and today the political forces with momentum on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide are the Islamists for whom ending U.S. influence in the region is a key point of consensus. Traditional U.S. allies are looking increasingly feeble and isolated, their plight personified by Jordan’s King Abdullah, the charming product of the English public school system, who has taken to telling any U.S. interviewer that will listen that unless the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved in a matter of weeks, the sky is going to fall.
Read the Baker report’s proposals carefully, and it’s plain that what it’s suggesting is a framework for managing the failure of Bush the Younger. Those the U.S. loves least in the region will not be swept away by any “democratic tsunami”; reality demands recognizing that their ability to influence events has actually increased while that of the U.S. is in steady decline. Salvaging something from Iraq demands that they be offered incentives for cooperation, as part of a wider “grand bargain” to stabilize the chronic, Chernobyl-like instability that the U.S. has brought to the heart of the region.
Baker knows that regional consent will give the political-military strategy currently being pursued by the U.S. its best chance of achieving something positive, and prepares the way for managing the fallout if it fails. And it certainly recognizes the probability of failure. The report’s political-military recommendations, after all, are simply an intensification of the policies being pursued at present — training and deploying Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. forces, securing Baghdad, pressing Iraq’s political leadership to rein in Shiite militias and offer accommodation to the Sunni insurgents, and so on. The difference, perhaps, is that Baker-Hamilton says there’s no point in doing this for more than another year — the Sunni insurgency has proved too tenacious to be militarily eliminated; the Shiite militias are part of the ruling coalition and the parties that dominate the government have shown little inclination to make the concessions to the Sunnis necessary to win their assent for the new order, and so on. A regional grand bargain, then, becomes an essential insurance policy — if you have failed to eradicate adversaries and rivals, best to engage with them in pursuit of a framework of understanding that can, at least, manage your differences.
Foreign policy for grownups, in other words. Pity that there aren’t any in control in the White House. Challenged by the British media who, unlike the White House press corps, are willing to rough Bush up when he spews silly spin in defiance of reality, the President last week came back with this marvelously Orwellian formulation: “I am disappointed by the pace of success.” (What was that thing Bob Dylan once sang about “there’s no success like failure…”?)
Teletubbies say “Mission Accomplished”
At this point, it’s worth returning to Mark Danner’s brilliant New York Review of Books essay on the Administration’s “War of the Imagination,” which seeks to explain how it was that the U.S. was able to commit such patent blunders in Iraq that most U.S. officials on the ground could recognize them as that. It really is a fascinating piece, because it sets out just how George W. Bush literally dispensed with the policy process that had served every post WWII president before him — the careful collating and weighing of findings by different arms of the national security bureaucracy into assessments of the balance of forces and the options available and their consequences. Danner writes:
Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world…
Thus the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loathe to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about “spreading democracy” and “greetings with sweets and flowers,” and then about “dead-enders” and “turning points,” and finally about “staying the course” and refusing “to cut and run”— began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
The election of November 7, 2006, marks the moment when the War of Imagination decisively gave way to the war on the ground and when officials throughout the American government, not least the President himself, were forced to recognize and acknowledge a reality that much of the American public had discerned months or years before. The ideological canopy now has lifted. The study groups are at their work. Americans have come to know what they do not know. If confronted with that simple question the smiling President Ahmadinejad of Iran put to Mike Wallace last August —”I ask you, sir, what is the American Army doing inside Iraq?”—how many Americans could offer a clear and convincing answer?
Danner outlines how it was that Bush literally shut down the thinking processes of the U.S. government, insulating himself from any information that would offer him shades of gray to muddle his “moral clarity.” Instead, he would follow his gut instinct. Yes, it is bizarre to the point of being almost inconceivable that the leader of the world’s last superpower could aggressively insulate himself from anything approaching a rational policy process. But perhaps it is testimony to the failings of what Greg Palast has called “the best democracy money can buy” that individual whose emotional and intellectual makeup are so obviously those of an angry adolescent has final authority over U.S. foreign policy — or, as he once put, “I’m the decider.”
Baker-Hamilton essentially tells Bush that in order to rescue U.S. strategic interests and avoid a looming regional disaster, he will have to reverse much of the foreign policy he has pursued since taking office. Somehow, I doubt that this is a man who can admit failure, and do what he can to salvage the situation. Instead, Bush will continue to search for signs out there affirming his fantasy, most recently making common cause with Abdulaziz al-Hakim, whom Bush has a strange habit of calling “His Eminence” (Hakim is simply the leader of a political party and the commander of a militia — perhaps the most sectarian of the Shiite parties, and certainly the one closest to Iran). Hakim, of course, has no intention of doing what the U.S. wants the government to do in response to the Sunnis, of course, but no matter. He’s obviously saying something the fantasy-minded Bush wants to hear.
Right now the signs are that it’s already too late to save the Iraq mission, and that this Administration is incapable of either recognizing the scale of their defeat or doing what is necessary to contain the damage. Instead, expect them to muddle along until the problem can be handed over to Bush’s successor. And maybe drop a few bombs on Iran along the way, just to show how “Churchillian” you are.
Brilliant summation. So it seems there is no eixit possible.
The patient’s bleeding is severe, perhaps we are seeing irreversible shock developing. Further heroic efforts; however, are contra-indicated due to the presence of a stage 4 tumor (our Israeli-centric foreign policy) which has always been the primary threat to the patient and which we are afraid to excise.
The actual conditions on the ground in Iraq, particlularly Baghdad, make it clear that a de facto partition of Iraq is underway. The Kurds have already gone far along in that drection. The only way out of the awful mess in Iraq is for all foreign forces to withdraw as quickly as possible and let the various factions, tribes and sectarian grous decide on their own if they want to keep a central soveriegn state or not. If not, so be it. If three separate states come into existence, some normalization of life may be possible for the people of Mesopotamia. The present arrangement is not working and won’t, so it would be better for all concerned to recognize that and make plans for a future without an Iraqi state. Better, too, for the US and the West to admit what the true and only reason for the invasion and occupation is and begin to honestly and fairly deal with that: the peak oil and decline crisis. A world-wide conference on peak oil and renewable energy alternatives needs to begin, and fast. Wars for control of what’s left of the world oil reserves will only make matters far worse. Time to grow up and face the music, or we will all be listening to a dirge for the species.
This is a situation where failure cannot be admitted because one has systematically and deliberately painted oneself into a corner. Bush is not by conventional standards sane; but he’s sane enough to understand that he has, at all costs, to avoid being the “president who lost Iraq”. It’s inconceivable that the Republicans will control the next White House, so the President who gets the blame will be a Democrat. the Democrats will know this and therefore try and continue the war, even when they come to power, for even longer. So, there will never be an end to this war until the US people, or the US army rebels. Something that might just happen.
This website has a thoughtful and empathetic point
of view for the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East.
It is a valuable addition to the discussion presenting
a Jewish point of view concerned with the clear criminal
and immoral actions of the Zionist project in the Arab
Middle East. I suggest that Mike Hanna make a distinction
between the Zionist ideology and the large majority of
normal Jews whose futures are threatened by the brutal and racist apartheid policies of Israel. It is true the many
Jews who subscribe to this ideology advise our current
government. Is it because of AIPAC money in our political
system? Partly. The debate over the USA and Israel is the
one that must be addressed before we see sanity and
law return to the conduct of US foreign policy. Identifying
Zionism as the problem and not Jews as a people avoids the anti-semetic trap. Thank you for the intelligent forum.
Bob K
Good Article. Thank You. George W is in the same position as Terri Shivo was back when they wanted to shut off her life support. When they do eventually look at his shrunken brain and declare him braindead who will be supprised. Too bad Frisk wont be around to save him.
Bush, Republicans and Democrats need to be brought to justice for the Genocide in Iraq. We’ve been bombing that country non stop for over 15 years. I’m glad Saddam is going to be hanged, but he isn’t the only one to blame for the millions of Iraqis killed in the holocaust over there.
It’s not simply jews, it is zionists. Not all jews (including myself) support israel. Don’t listen to the counsel of zionists!
Mike Hanna, ain’t no shame being pro jewish anti zionist for a free Israel, a free Palestine, No Occupation, No terrorism, No State Terrorism, no Walls, no war, no apartheid, no more victims, no more dead humans before their time…
I agree with Bob we should seperate Jexs from the Zionists. After all we have the Christian zionists that support the same ideology and they are not jews. There are planty of Jews out there taht rae as disgusted about this whole misguided adventure as nonn Jews.
However AIPAC is a strong force that drives the US policies in the worls and it puts theinterest of Israel way ahead of the interest of the USA.
It is time for America to wake uo and put its interest ahead of Israel. We Americans are suffering heavily due to our misguided and blind policies. I am not saying that America sdhould abandon Israel NO.
It is time to treat the situation 50 50 and 99 1 in favour of Israel. The cold war is over and there is no communist threat. Any threat now is due to Bush’s idiotic adminstartion.
But we can not blame Bush for the whole thing because we the illetrate stupid Americans did not learn from his first term and voted for him for a second therm.
I guess we deserve that idiot for a president. We will pay the price for next dozen years.
But the sad part is that we the American people will never learn and few years down the road are bound to elect another idiot6.
Lord have mercy.
Great job for the article keep them comming because our news papers in America do not have the balls to write articles like that.
Peace KB
Why can’t we discuss the Middle East without primitive Anti-Semitism being espoused? Has history, let alone logic not taught us anything? Why make all Jews responsible for the policies of Israel’s Likud? Are all Americans to be tried for the war crimes of GWB? Anyone who advocates discrimination and collective punishment has zero credibility in any debate – I’m looking at you, Mike Hanna. Oh, and btw., I’m not Jewish, or “paid” by Jews, you bigot.
It would be quite wrong to say that it is Israel that is responsible for the Iraqi war. No doubt the Likud in Israel was happy and lobbying for the war, and that there’s a powerful and influencial Likud lobby here in the U.S. But GWB went to war for reasons quite his own. And lest we forget, it wasn’t just Israel-loving neocons who were beating the drums for this war. Don’t forget the batsh|t insane evangelicals who are all to happy to see Armageddon (at the cost of Israel’s very existence!). There are many more of those than all neocons and Jewish Likud supporters put together. So can we quit blaming Jews for GWB’s folly?
In my personal experience, the vast majority of Jews are decent progressive and enlightened people. And the majority are disgusted by Israel’s suicidal Likud policies. Remember, despite the Republican’s heroic efforts at wooing Jews, the majority of Jews vote solidly Democratic. If only the rest of America voted like most Jews, we’d have president Gore and no Iraq war. Think about that, those of you who are so eager to assign blame for Iraq to the Jews and who are so eager to deprive Jews of their rights as Americans to pursue political power like anybody else.
That said there is no question that Israel has an outsize influence on American policies. And that has been a disaster for the U.S. in the Middle East. But the reasons behind this influence are not just AIPAC (or some kind of domestic “fifth column” of American Jews as the bigots would have). It started with seeking to upstage the Soviets – we actually stole Israel away from the Soviets in a sense… Soviets for their own reasons were early Israel champions (recognition etc.), and ideologically closer (Socialism). With post-colonial turn of the Arab world against the former colonialists (Britain and France who were still meddling in the ME and couldn’t let go), the Soviets abandoned Israel in favor of exploiting the Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism. Which of course immediately turned the West against the “going to communism Arabs” and into the waiting arms of Israel.
That, was the beginning. As the Cold War escalated and the U.S. became the primary power in fighting for Western dominance, the die was cast – Israel cleverly exploited this, but with full cooperation from the U.S. It was a mutual embrace – not some evil underhanded hoodwinking from “the Jews”. I also happen to think that the resulting policies were not in the interest of not only the U.S., but are actually suicidal for Israel long term.
It will be pointed out that AIPAC and part of the Jewish establishment are often working for the short term interests of Israel more than the U.S. Well, like I said, I think it actually is counterproductive for Israel – it’s like scoring heroin for the drug addict… you are doing him no favors. But even so, you can’t say “the Jews”. AIPAC represents only a part of Jewish political participation. And even those misguided AIPAC folks – well, I don’t agree with them, but I have enough compassion and understanding of history to realize that what they do is ultimately still an echo of the holocaust. When the Jews saw world reaction to the holocaust as it was happening, the powerlessness of the Jews even in the U.S. to affect policy or accept even refugees, can you really blame them that they said “never again”? Yes, it meant engaging in the political process and a search for a voice and power. Some of it is ultimately misguided – AIPAC comes to mind. But it is not a result of evil design. Even so, the bottom line is – AIPAC is not all of American Jews. And AIPAC is ultimately, ironically, harmful to Israel long term.
The U.S. must re-evaluate it’s relationship with Israel, especially with the Likud. Otherwise there can be no long term success for the U.S. in the Middle East.
This doesn’t directly relate to your post, but I just wanted to share this friggin’ sweet interactive Middle East map with your readership:
http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf
Tony, this was a confection of great thinking. Thank you. And the cherries on top? “Foreign policy for grownups, in other words.” “Teletubbies say ‘Mission Accomplished.'” When I got to the latter, I had the first laugh of the day.
Bob K, your remarks are on the money; specifically: “The debate over the USA and Israel is the one that must be addressed before we see sanity and law return to the conduct of US foreign policy.” Outing Zionism — now an imperative — should drag out the Christian Apocalypse crowd who spent six years gumming up American foreign policy with crazy glue.
Great Flash, Pat. Too bad someone didn’t prepare this for Bush when he first got into office. He might have known what he was doing. My take? I will bet 10Gs that if you gave Bush a map of everything east of Italy without the country names, he couldn’t identify more than three countries accurately. I’m being generous with three, because he’s get Russia and China correctly.
Yes Tony, impeccable analysis again, you are proving to be a genuine oracle!
Let us pause to reflect on the longer term consequences of U.S. arrogance and ignorance so well exploited by those masters of American pathology the Israelis. Whatever option the current administration decides on in their forthcoming “policy adjustment” springs out of the same failure of imagination that created this predicament. Thus, the impetus to increase the drama by an order-of-magnitude in order to escape from the Quicksands swallowing them up will be irresistible: a strike against the ‘mother of all evil’ Iran, or furtively blessing their cunning proxy to do so on their behalf.
…. and the likelihood of this appears to grow more plausible daily.
We Semites & Muslims have a saying: “I Love you, but I love myself more!” – – so we do not expect America to love us, but only to love itself in a proper healthy manner. As for one who does not exercise such a natural God-endowed self-love on behalf of its own well-being — we can only beseech Our Lord to have infinite Mercy on such a maladjusted creature.
With profound respect and appreciation for your efforts,
Jafar
Guys, thanks for all the kind words — when I read Mike Hanna’s, I instantly deleted it, because I have no tolerance for anti-semitism on this site. But having seen some of the great responses, I wished I’d left it there because it certainly made for an interesting discussion point. In general, though, be warned: When you start writing about “the Jews”, chances are your post is going to be axed. Because I’m a Jew, and I seem to always be left out of the phone chain whenever these conspiracies are being hatched!
I’m not a Zionist, as you know, and I believe that Zionism has had a corrosive and debilitating impact on ethical Judaism. But Zionism is no more essential to being Jewish than Slobodan Milosevic is an expression of the essence of being Serb…
I just read the Teletubbies joke. I’m going to use that one on my Navy aviator bro. Thanks for the material!
The Baker report will simply make Bush more instransigent
than ever. He is a lame duck president who has nothing to
lose by hanging on to his war in Iraq until noon, January 20
2009. To accept the recommendations of the Baker report
would be an unbearable double humiliation-it would be to
accept what has previously been denounced as the “cut
and run” position; and it would be to submit in public to
advice offered by Daddy’s good friend, Dutch Uncle Jim
Baker.Better two more years of war. In the meantime, he
can fix things up with John “the Body Bag”McCain to get
him the Republican nomination so John can go on to the
White House , send more troops to Iraq,and protract our
military involvement there for at least another four years.
Impeachment, anyone?
The best way to separate authenic Jewish issues from Zionist ideology is to see that the ideology is essentially an American phenomenon. It is an American, not a “foriegn” Israeli or, worse yet, “Jewish” ideology. It may have been in its historical origins – actually as an European colonial enterprise – but it has now been adopted as a belief by the Americans. It is now an American problem, embedded in American life.
It is an authentic American political movement with tremendous influence within the US political establishment and elite. It is intimately linked to the life of the vast global “military industrial complex”, of which the state of Israel is merely a totally integrated component. Abandonment of Israel would be like abandoning Lockheed or Okinawa, unthinkable for the Beltway establishment.
Contrast that with the inability to integrate that other pillar of US power in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Attempts to do so from the Iranian Revolution, Gulf War and beyond – of which support for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980’s was one element – have only produced a civil war within the “complex” in the form of Al Qaeda and more.
The violent contradictions between the “two pillars” – American Zionism and an alien Sharia law – in the US Middle East position is what make Iran as a common enemy to both so attractive to the Beltway. That is why Bush/Cheney meet with no real opposition despite the impossibility of their policy.
American Zionism, as American as apple pie. Sharia head-chopping – no anesthetics included – not.
Obviously, the Baker Report has just made Bush more
instransigent than ever. Although the voters have rejected
his war, what does he care. He is a lame duck president
with nothing to lose by playing out the clock in Iraq for two
years and then handing the war over to his successor.
The Bushies are most likely collaborating even now with
John”The Body Bag” McCain to get him the nomination so
that, upon his succession to office, the war can be widened
and prolonged. Or Bush may flip out altogether and decide
to send more troops in himself. Impeachment, anyone?
I find this discussion very interesting, and I have a question, or a couple. It seems that David Wade might be right, that the only way out of Iraq goes through impeachment, because Bush will not budge. There will not be any real impeachment movement unless and until some sectors of the American elites–maybe the military and Wall Street– decide that Bush is becoming too great a liablitiy. There is another factor , namely: the ISG’s report has very clear “recommendations” concerning Iraq’soil, and thus the report is seen as recommending various holding actions until the laws can be put in place for oil companies to get control of Iraq’a oil wealth. If this is true, is it possible that Bush and BAker are playing a good cop/ bad cop game? (Baker’s allegiance and interest is linked to getting the oil for his clients and colleagues, such as oil companies and the Carlyle Group. We also know that his firm represents the Saudis, not the Americans. ) It seems to me that anything he says has to be seen in terms of his bottom-line allegiances.
Is it possible that there is a struggle within the elites regarding how much of Bush they/their interests can take? I.e., at some point will there be one elite faction that will want to pull the plug on Bush because of what is happening to our economy, our actual armed forces. Iraq seems to be wrecking the economy and the army. And as with Nixon, will kind of start the impeachment wheels in motion purely as a last resort to get enough oxygen to survive? And might there be another elite faction, Big Oil and true-believer neocons and maybe military contractors (civliians as opposed to actual fighting military) , who will wnat to dig in in Iraq basically out of greed? Seems that if this is at all possible, Baker would fall into the latter category. I am curious as to whether the bloggers here have any comment on this line of thinking. Thanks.
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