Another green room tale:
This past Sunday, former Secretary of State James Baker was a guest on ABC News' This Week, and I had the chance to chat with him about his new project: chairing a bipartisan commission investigating what to do in Iraq. (The other cochairman is former Representative Lee Hamilton, a Democrat.) Baker noted that no one should expect his outfit--which will produce a report after the elections--to come up with a "magic bullet." There are no "easy solutions," he said. He noted that the administration had "to admit that big mistakes were made." But he said his commission would not delve into George W. Bush's blunders (that's my word) and instead would "start with the situation we have today." He said the commission and its staff had already spoken to hundreds of people--including "people even the US does not talk to." I gather that was a reference to Iranian and Syrian diplomats or officials.
So will the commission produce a watered-down document with merely general ideas about what needs to be done? Baker said that the group could end up with a report that says "here are the four things you should do." Or, it could list various alternatives and the likely consequences of each. In any event, he said, he wants the commission to produce a consensus set of recommendations. If there are dissenting views, he remarked, the commission's report will have less impact. He hardly seemed upbeat, though, about coming up with a good way out. And he added, "if you can't pacify Baghdad, it's lost."
We also chatted about my new book, Woodward's and Fiasco. He noted that he had raised reservations about the Iraq war the summer before the invasion (which he had) and that in his 1995 book, The Politics of Diplomacy, he had explained why he, the first President Bush, and others in their administration had decided at the end of the first Persian Gulf War not to pursue Saddam Hussein's troops into Baghdad: it would have been a disaster. Postwar Iraq, they figured, would have posed innumerable (and perhaps insoluble) challenges and would have been marked by violent sectarian conflict. I don't have that book in my office, so I can't check. But I'll take Baker at his word on this. After all, it was no radical proposition in 1991 or 2003 that post-Saddam Iraq would be one helluva mess, if not a quagmire. And, Baker added, Dick Cheney agreed--at least back then. "Cheney was with us," Baker said. "Then he went to AEI and they gave him the truth serum." Or some other type of serum?
It will be interesting to see how the realists of the Baker-Hamilton commission interact with the non-reality-based, neoconnish war cheerleaders of the Bush administration. Might there end up being a fight for Bush's heart, brain or whatever between the Baker gang and the Cheney hold-outs? It's hard to believe, but Bush family politics and psychology might still drive US policy in Iraq.
As he was leaving the television studio, I said to Baker, "I truly wish you well and good luck." I never thought I'd say such kind words to the fellow who engineered Bush's manipulative win in Florida in 2000. But bad wars make for strange bedfellows.
Posted by David Corn at October 10, 2006 02:07 PM
