Waiting for the Baker report

The long-awaited Baker report on the Iraq War is due out Wednesday morning 11:00AM Eastern time. Much of the content has been telegraphed, though it's not official until it's official. But don't expect to hear James Baker say at his press conference, "The Iraq War was a huge mistake. Our troops' presence in Iraq is only making things worse. So we recommended beginning immediately with a complete withdrawal of combat troops on as short a timeline as possible, certainly not to exceed six months. We should stop the air war immediately. And we should immediately switch the military mission to force protection during the withdrawal, plus evacuating any Iraqis who are likely to be targeted by death squads for having worked with the Americans."

Ain't gonna happen. At least not on Wednesday.

The punditocracy's script on James Baker is that he is the sensible Bush family fixer, a level-headed foreign policy realist and someone who looks for broad, pragmatic compromises. Like many of these scripts, it has some foundation in reality. But Baker is also a cutthroat Republican partisan; there's a reason he was the one who took charge of the 2000 Florida vote-count battle for the Bush campaign. And his first, second and third priorities in this report on Iraq will be to minimize that war as an issue cutting against the Republican Party in 2008.


Tom Englehardt (The Iraq Study Group Rides to the Rescue TomDispatch.com 12/04/06) looks at the leaks on the Baker-Hamilton report and gives us some clues in how to sort out the serious Iraq War proposals from the frivolous and deceptive. Buzzwords to look for on the latter would include middle-round, middle-ground, advisers, responsible redeployment, and the like. The serious proposals at this point will include a fixed deadline for withdrawal, an end to the air war and an explicit policy renouncing permanent American bases in Iraq. As Englehardt writes, "You'll know something's in the air when some serious panel gets together to sort out our future strategy in Iraq, and you start regularly seeing 'withdrawal' surface in the media without an adjective attached, or when you see any sober discussion of permanent bases, American air power, or oil."

For reality-based information on the Iraq War, you can hardly do better than the report from (war supporter!) Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Recent papers of his include:

Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War 11/30/06

Options for Expanding Iraqi Forces: Goals and Realities 11/02/06

Iraq: Milestones, Benchmarks, and Real World Options 10/30/06

A briefing he did on 11/29/06 is also available in audio and transcript form.

I would also highly recommend Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (2006) by George McGovern and William Polk, which I reviewed here several days ago, and the long article Iraq: The War of the Imagination by Mark Danner New York Review of Books Online 11/16/06; also available at Salon.

Tags: baker report, iraq study group, iraq war, james baker

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