The Signal Of Surrender In Iraq

The return of James Baker to foreign policy-making prominence.

William Katz refreshes our memories on what a disaster JB was as Bush41's SecState (via Powerline):

In all the commotion over the North Korean nuclear test, it's easy to ignore another critical, and disturbing, story - the emergence of former Secretary of State James B. Baker III as a key adviser to President Bush on Iraq.

Let us not forget Baker's catastrophic performance as secretary of state under Bush 41, a performance marked by cynicism, an absence of any admirable principle, and an intense hostility to Israel. Baker is widely reported to have said, in a private meeting, "Fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway," when asked about Jewish concern over his Mideast policy. He famously read out the White House phone number when testifying before Congress, saying the Israeliscould call it when they were ready for peace.

He presided over the sending of Brent Scowcroft to break bread with the Chinese only six months after Tiananmen Square, as if nothing had happened. When asked why Americans should support the first Gulf War, he replied, "Jobs." Nothing like inspiring the nation. After that war, he famously went to Iraq and essentially turned his back on those who were revolting against Saddam.

He says we should talk to enemies like Syria, and relates how he made fifteen trips there without result, but that on the sixteenth try he succeeded. What was the "success"? Why, Baker says, the Madrid Conference. What did the Madrid Conference accomplish? Hard to say, but, to paraphrase Eisenhower's famous comment - if you give me a week, I might be able to think of something.

The first Bush Administration was even said to worry that the liberation of Eastern Europe was proceeding too quickly. No "tear down that wall" talk from the crowd.

With the exception of the freeing of Kuwait's oil wells, it's hard to think of any real, lasting accomplishment when Baker was at State. If he should emerge as a pinch hitter, we should recall what happened the last time he came to bat.

Baker claims to be operating with the Bush Administration's Iraq policy framework, and to disavow any alternatives smacking of "cut and run," but his prooffered solution looks only one or two steps removed from it: a "compromise" nullifying the Iraqi constitution and the government elected under its auspices in favor of "federalization." Basically the partitioning of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd sections, loosely united in Baghdad for the purposes of a common foreign policy, national defense, and allocation of oil revenues.

If this reminds you of Senator "Slow-Joe" Biden's recent Iraq policy trial balloon, congratulations on your perceptual acuity. After both the Coalition and the Iraqi people having done and sacrificed so much to rebuild their country, in rides Dubya's hired gun to start unraveling it all. Does this man really need a primer to figure out what would happen next? Turkey moving into the Iraqi north to settle long-festering matters with the Kurds? The Iranians moving into the south to vassalize that portion of Iraq? The Sunnis crying foul and going postal on everybody?

It's the civil war that has not been and is not, but would be if we go in this crazy, self-defeating direction. Even worse, we would be imposing it on the Iraqis after having allowed them what we liberated the country in part to make possible: self-determination. And THEN would come "cut & run," only by that time it would be President Hillary Rodham giving the orders to bug out.

I instinctively and reflexively rebel against David Frum's dark-as-a-sealed-well pessimism about the ultimate outcome of the Iraq experiment and the confrontation with Iran. But stories like this one make him look more and more like a prophet, if a Jeremiahic one.

UPDATE: Ditto Michael Ledeen, if you can stomach so much gloom in one sitting.