Heaping Scorn

Gerard Baker, writing in the Times of London, is as big a fan of the Iraq Study Group's vacuous recommendations as Charles Krauthammer. Or an awful lot of people, in fact. He's not at all supportive at this point of the conduct to date of the war in Iraq and yet he also sees no path to success in the Baker boys' recommendations.

Outside the US the Baker report was greeted with the kind of hushed reverence with which the shepherds heard out the Archangel that wintry night in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. The great and the good had deliberated for months and lo! from the clouds there came a great host of the heavenly army with a stunning rebuke for the Bush Administration, pointing the way forward, with stops at all the favourite travel destinations of America’s critics. Simply invite the Iranians and the Syrians to the White House for tea and pistachios, tell the Iraqis to solve their political and religious differences and start shipping the boys home. Oh, and while you’re at it, lean on the Israelis to solve their differences with the Palestinians, and everything will be fine. Next: the Baker report into The Cure For The Common Cold. 79 Recommendations!

In America, where true realism these days holds sway, as opposed to the phoney “realism” beloved elsewhere, Baker has been met with a great deal more circumspection — and not just by the dwindling band of dead-enders in the Bush bunker. Democrats publicly welcomed the report’s observation that the administration screwed up in Iraq (did we need a commission to tell us that?) But privately some of the party’s most senior foreign policy people are just as perplexed by the general emptiness of the report’s recommendations as anyone else.

The ISG’s conclusions have been met with such a drenching chorus of raspberries that an intriguing conspiracy theory is doing the rounds in Washington. It says that Mr Baker, the loyal Bush family friend, agreed to be the fall guy. By demonstrating that, after all his serious efforts, the best he could come up with was a set of recommendations that run the gamut from the ineffably predictable to the laughably unworkable, he showed the world that maybe the President’s approach — stick it out, stay the course, soldier on — really is the least unpalatable of all the options.

I don't really believe that conspiracy theory. In fact, this is really the first time I have heard it stated like this. I rather believe that Charles Krauthammer called it correctly this morning. Baker as a vain and foolish King Canute arrogantly commanding the waves to retreat. But Gerard Baker thinks Bush has no choice but to push ahead and not follow the ISG recommendations. Read the whole thing. It isn't uplifting, but it does reflect reality better than the ISG report.