William Pfaff on the The Baker-Hamilton Report

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Anyone who reads me regularly knows my weakness for William Pfaff. Here in a few words, while analyzing the Baker-Hamilton report, he asks all the main questions. 1.) How did this fool ever get elected president in the first place? 2.) How to prevent something like that ever happening again? And finally, 3.) Will it ever be possible to clean up his stinking mess? Chapeaux cher maître! DS
Abstract: The domestic political motivation behind Congressional appointment of this independent commission was to find a door through which the United States could leave Iraq with the national eagle’s feathers’ intact. It reflects concern for how to handle the domestic political consequences of the Iraq failure. In this its success is uncertain. The initial evidence is that George W. Bush will react with hostility to this stinging attack on the foolhardiness, arrogance, and as yet unknown eventual costs of his adventure. It may change little in his conduct of the war. The intellectual poverty that lay behind administration policy was evident from the start, in the political and strategic naiveté of the neo-conservative project, which treated war on Iraq as if it were a videogame. Donald Rumsfeld’s final “recommendations” to the president as he resigned were of stupefying emptiness: a rats’ nest of jottings: do this, try that, see if that might work. This was supposed to be an intellectually serious executive and analyst, like Robert S. McNamara? But the president himself has proven to be no more than a college fraternity prankster pretending to be president: “I Am the Decider.” How do Americans get people like this in high office? The present system, or is it a lucrative industry?, of selecting and electing presidents has to end. The essential step is to ban paid political advertising.(...) The report’s insistence on the centrality of the Palestinian question, its proposal for neutral international experts to advise the Iraqi government, and its emphasis on reintegration of Ba’ath party members and Arab nationalists, and on national and regional reconciliation as well, are a fitting conclusion to a report that honors its authors, but may have come too late, or worse, have no serious effect on administration policy. READ IT ALL

Iraq: the last reality show

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Frank Rich quotes Chuck Hagel,“The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” That is the phrase that sums up the situation best. When Bush invaded Iraq, he set in motion forces he could not foresee and never could control. In effect, he opened the gates of hell. The Middle East could be compared with the San Andreas fault: if it's quiet you have the West Coast, if it moves too much you don't. So many things hang on the price of oil and its free movement in a liberalized market place. So much of America's political and cultural life depend on the safety of Israel, that if oil and Israel are sufficiently and simultaneously jeopardized, we will be looking at the social equivalent of "the big one": that earthquake that all Californians know awaits them. Americans are fascinated by disasters because they have had so little experience of them. Giant gorillas, creatures from outer space, strange diseases: lines form around the block. Paranoia sells tickets. The last Americans who remember fear and hardship personally are the children of the great depression and there are not too many of them left. In most areas of the world if you haven't known catastrophe personally your family can tell you about it. An example: in the 1960s I had a Japanese friend my age, Takeo, whose father was a famous Tokyo architect,. Takeo was upper middle class to his fingertips: Takeo's older brother starved to death, in Tokyo, in 1945. Most families, rich and poor, around the world have stories like that. Americans live blessedly in a bubble; that bubble is about to burst. Look around you, enjoy this Christmas; breathe in its air like the air of the last day of summer. DS

Frank Rich - The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq - New York Times Abstract: In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra. Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis. This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “absolutely, we’re winning” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.(...) Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.cIts recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas. The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is. By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. (...) The Iraqi government’s ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group’s members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman. The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from “The Way Forward” but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would “require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police,” not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain. Since these troops don’t exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can’t satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he’s also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many “reviews” he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we’ve “lost,” until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president. But as Chuck Hagel said last week, “The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally.(...) The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age. READ IT ALL (bootleg: hat to jurassicporc)

Baker Report "antisemitic" and Jimmy Carter is trashed: the battle is joined

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The selection of neocon blogs from the Los Angeles Times below is a good sample of how this battle over Baker-Hamilton and Israel's influence on US policy is going to shape up. Most of the classic points are here, beginning with blanket charges of anti-Semitism, references to "Islamofascism" and of course "Munich" and Neville Chamberlain. Also in the LA Times is a brave piece by Jimmy Carter, certainly America's most underrated president, defending himself against the, by now, inevitable charges of antisemitism, where he says:
"Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that "he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." Some reviews posted on Amazon.com call me "anti-Semitic," and others accuse the book of "lies" and "distortions." A former Carter Center fellow has taken issue with it, and Alan Dershowitz called the book's title "indecent."(...) The book describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens. Obviously, I condemn any acts of terrorism or violence against innocent civilians, and I present information about the terrible casualties on both sides. The ultimate purpose of my book is to present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America, to precipitate discussion and to help restart peace talks (now absent for six years) that can lead to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. Another hope is that Jews and other Americans who share this same goal might be motivated to express their views, even publicly, and perhaps in concert. I would be glad to help with that effort. "
A selection of neocon bloggers from the Los Angeles Times

Roger Simon:

Is James Baker the biggest American anti-Semite since Father Coughlin[?]

Charles Johnson:

All these recommendations stem from a basis of complete fantasy, in which Israel's Arab neighbors are genuinely interested in peace and all we have to do to get it is ask them the right way.

Michael Brandon McClellan:

The report is thus simultaneously both unoriginal and ridiculous.

David Horowitz:

The news is sickening to every decent soul except to the Islamic Nazis and their friends in the international left and the delusional folk who think that if America leaves Iraq the terrorists will leave too (Speaker Pelosi actually made that precise comment this October). Talking to the Hitler in Teheran and the Arab Mussolini in Damascus makes perfect sense to the contemporary Chamberlains -- Baker, Hamilton (he of the capitulate to the Sandinistas crowd). I never thought I would live to see a day when the last years of the Thirties would be repeated, let alone by Americans. But there it is.

Hugh Hewitt:

Of the 43 "former officials and experts" consulted --including Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Friedman, Leslie Gelb, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Ken Pollack, Thomas Ricks, and George Will-- the ISG did not find it necessary to talk with, say, Victor Davis Hanson, Lawrence Wright, Robert Kaplan, Mark Steyn, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht, or Christopher Hitchens. The ISG did talk with Bill Kristol. I wonder how long that sit down lasted?

The report combines an almost limitless condescension towards the "Iraqi sovereign government," even going so far as to lay out a timetable for its exact legislative program for the next six months, with a cavalier indifference to the Syrian death squads operating in Lebanon, and the certain nature ofDS the Iranian regime --still, on this very day, hosting the anti-Holocaust conference.

It is a wonder, this bit of appeasement virtuosity, and I think it will gain for its authors all the lasting fame that has attached itself to the name Samuel Hoare, and his brainchild, the Hoare-Laval Agreement.

This battle is going to be the most fierce and wrenching in the United States since the anti-slavery debates of the 1850s. It is absolutely essential that it take place, the air must be cleared. What is so tragic is that this debate about Israel's and its lobby's influence on American policy could only take place in the context of of America's huge failure in Iraq. DS

Watch Hillary

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Hillary Clinton is the weather vane of American politics, the consummate professional who crafts everything she says or does to a very sophisticated (and expensive) reading of all the pressure groups, polls, niches and think tanks. She always seeks to be perfectly positioned on every issue, perfecting the Clinton trademark, "triangulation". For Hillary the Baker-Hamilton report presents a horrible problem. On one side is public opinion, that is to say; living, breathing voters and the foreign policy establishment: their consensus is talk to Iran and to hold a regional peace conference to settle Israel/Palestine. On the other side is the most unpopular president in living memory and of course, the neocons (Murdoch owns the Weekly Standard) followed by AIPAC and behind them the Israeli right wing; all of whom want to attack Iran. This is impossible to triangulate. Here, on one side, we have the weight of public opinion finally focused on reality and on the other side a pressure group famous for its power. Voters on one side, financing and press coverage on the other. A 'perfect storm' for a political hack. To really follow what is happening now, to know which way the wind is blowing, watch Hillary. Following her in the next few days and weeks may be comic as she whipsaws around this issue trying to find the perfect fix. DS