"Bush's Policy Quagmire" - Blumenthal (chickens coming home to roost dept.)

[greeneyedboy]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/10/26/iraq/index.html

. . . . Bush is engaged in a shadow politics of fending off Baker that he can't admit and that require new disingenuous explanations for rejection even before receiving Baker's report. But will consummate political player Baker permit a dynamic in which he is humiliated and join the ranks of the dismissed and discarded, like "good soldier" Colin Powell? If Baker, taking his cue from Bush's rebuke, simply closes ranks, what would have been his point, except to highlight his failure at an attempted rescue? By undermining Baker, especially beforehand, Bush sends a signal that he is determined to maintain his counterproductive strategies in Iraq and the Middle East. Yet his tightening coil will trigger further attempts among U.S. allies and Arab governments to disentangle themselves.

In a small office of the U.S. Institute of Peace in downtown Washington, the Baker-Hamilton commission (aka Iraq Study Group) has been listening to the unvarnished assessments of Middle East experts, former intelligence officers and other government officials, and a host of journalists with experience in the region. Though its report is yet unwritten and none of the witnesses have divulged their testimony, the commission's recommendations are apparent from Baker's statements and those close to him. Baker has made clear that stabilizing Iraq demands a new strategy for the whole Middle East. He favors restarting the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian territories with a strong U.S. hand. And he urges direct diplomatic negotiations with Syria and Iran. "I personally believe in talking to your enemies. Neither the Syrians nor the Iranians want a chaotic Iraq," Baker has said.

"The Iraq situation is not winnable in any real sense of the word 'winnable,'" said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who was chief of the Middle East desk of the National Security Council for the elder Bush and director of policy planning in the State Department during President Bush's first term, last week. Haass' views are a surrogate for Baker's, as well as those of Brent Scowcroft, who was the former President Bush's national security advisor and who remains close to both him and Baker.

In "A New Middle East," an article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a shorter version of that article in the Financial Times, Haass lays out the outline of the Baker plan that will be presented to Bush. His analysis ruthlessly casts aside Bush's high-flown rhetoric and attributes its emptiness to Bush's failures. . . .

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/10/26/iraq/index.html

(full text is definitely worth reading.)

[Marrak]

1. Some nightmare chickens...

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His analysis ruthlessly casts aside Bush's high-flown rhetoric and attributes its emptiness to Bush's failures. . . .