In the language of the cinema, the ancients of the Iraq Study Group enter the tragedy at the critical moment, like eight wizened Dumbledores or Gandalfs, their metaphorical beards flowing below twinkling eyes that have seen all that needs to be seen, windows in minds that know all that needs to be known. We know these characters and their places well. We're culturally conditioned to believe in their intervention, their wisdom, their mighty spells.
But these be not wizards. The man they seek to save is more Malfoy and Gollum than Harry and Frodo. And the evil they oppose is much harder to define; there is no Voldemort to slay, no Mordor to defeat.There are no spells, no magic, no storybook endings. As James Baker knows all too well, there are only shifting sands and ever-shrinking opportunities to sift those sands in the nation's favor.
The seven old men and one old woman of the ISG released a bland, careful, unrushed document this week, primed for the Bush Administration to ignore, pshawing and harrumphing past its elders with the hurried arrogance of late-for-supper middle age. Yet that graybeards' report is soaked in kerosene. And there's Lee Hamilton in full Walter Brennan gleeful malice. Tie a rag to it, flick the lighter, and woosh! The Bush legacy is a visible, burning inferno.
These are the days of who-voted-for-what scorecards in anticipation of next year's presidential rodeo, and it doesn't matter. These are the days of impeachment boomlets, and it doesn't matter. These are the days of shifting and shiftless congressional allegiances, and it doesn't matter.
What matters to Americans boils down to two hard, cold facts laid out in cool, politburo fashion by the Baker group in both their classic one-volume edition and the myriad interview since it was published.
One, young Americans are caught in a deadly, ever-tightening vise with no clear mission and no hope for "victory," a concept President Bush clings to like my 12-year-old still clings to Santa Claus. Our troops are dying now for nothing. This is an obscenity.
Secondly, we've screwed up very badly. We hurt our own national interest. We made a bad region worse. And we created a legacy that will remain for generations.
Notice the plural. I mean "we," not in the royal fashion of course, but snugly within the concept of collective guilt. I opposed the war, publicly and with activism. But I didn't do enough. I went on with my life most days. I slept pretty well at night. Democrats didn't do enough. None of us in our representative republic stood up nearly enough to stop this national disaster. So yeah, we've earned the collective we - earned it well in the blood of others and profound moral cowardice.
What matters now is excising the cancer; that means pulling out. We shy away from timetables and you know, perhaps there are good tactical reasons for doing so - maybe it gets more people killed. Jason's been reading the ISG's report, with his sharp eye slightly between the lines as usual:
You won't read incendiary language in the report--no talk of civil war, ethnic cleansing, or even peace with honor, Jim Baker is a much too careful man for that. But you don't need to read between the lines to get the message, it's there on the surface: Iraq has gone past civil war to complete anarchy and the most optimistic odds on establishing a stable Iraq with a strong central government is 50-50, in other words no better than random.
There's not a Sunni/Shi'a war going on. Instead there are more than half a dozen heavily armed factions, some with more than 100,000 troops at their disposal, all with private, sectarian goals not national Iraqi ones.
Jason's in the midst of a series on the ISG and I recommend following the whole thing; when he gets an obsession like this, he digs deep. Far deeper than official Washington. The seniority of the ISG, their careful deliberation, and their full consensus recommendations bought them little. This nut graph from the Washington Post round-up caught DC is full policy stasis - which, at this crushing time, is a national immorality:
On the day after the congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group released its widely anticipated report, much of Washington maneuvered to pick out the parts they like and pick apart those they do not. The report's authors were greeted with skepticism on Capitol Hill, and Democratic leaders used the occasion to press Bush to change course without embracing the commission's particular recipe themselves.
But to me the most stunning story of the day came in the blue-wrapped Times - the same issue that led with Bush's crabby dismissal of the ISG's recommendations and sidebarred Condi Rice's I-know-better attitude towards James Baker and his golden oldies. Philip Shenon's piece is a stunner, a bit of living history that will belong at the top of the archives, about the days when the old commissars ventured to Baghdad. It's the perfect coda to this post. Here's a long, liberal quoting of it - please read the whole thing:
For some members of the Iraq Study Group, the turning point came during four days in Baghdad in September. They found the trip so harrowing, they said, that they wondered if they could afford to wait to speak out about the disaster in Iraq.
Like other visitors, they arrived on a C-130 transport plane that performed a plunging corkscrew maneuver to avoid insurgent fire while landing at Baghdad’s airport. Then they were bundled into flak jackets and helmets and rushed onto attack helicopters for the five-minute flight to the Green Zone, the military-controlled neighborhood that is sealed off from the city.
There, they were placed in fleet of armored Humvees, each with a medic seated in the back to offer first aid in the event of a rocket attack. The roar of the Humvees’ engines could not mask the sound of explosions from car bombs outside the Green Zone. The security measures had been routine for most of the American occupation, but they were still jarring to these first-time visitors to the war zone.
“You understand this is real — this is a state of siege,” said Edward P. Djerejian, the former American ambassador to Israel and Syria who helped draft the Iraq Study Group’s report, released Wednesday, which called for an overhaul of American policy in Iraq. “The trip to Baghdad really solidified that perception for all of us.”
Whatever their early differences over the American venture in Iraq, some of those serving on the 10-member bipartisan panel and its staff say the trip to Baghdad brought them to a common understanding of the catastrophic situation in Iraq and how much had gone wrong in American planning for the occupation.
They said the situation in Baghdad was so bleak — and in many ways, so much worse than they expected — that the four Democrats and three Republicans on the trip debated releasing an interim report as soon as they returned home. They worried that a final report released after the November elections, as planned, would be too late to have any hope of salvaging the situation.
UPDATE: Like me, Steve Gilliard sees the actual policy recommendations of the ISG as deeply flawed, but cuts them some slack for essentially taking Bush out:
I'm less critical of the ISG report than some, because it has the adults saying this isn't working. Now their solutions may suck, but they have finally broken the stranglehold of Bush's cheerleading on the discussion, actually isolating him. It was the Washington establishment saying end the war.
As Lindsay Beyerstein points out, "re-branding American troops as 'force protection' won't take them out of combat when they are targets and the entire country is a potential battlefield." And Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, looks at it from a classic management POV: "...for some reason, our president isn't listening to his board right now."
UPDATE II: In comments, Tony asks why I think the report is flawed - basically, because the panel seems to believe (taking political cover, I think) that there actually is an Iraqi nationalist base that can control things there somehow, if only etc. I think that's rubbish. Further, the ISG also shifts the accepted, centrist compromise solution to Bush's madness quite a bit, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in his thoughtful post:
Americans are done with this war. They have given up on it and want it over with. But the B-H Report has somehow supplanted the views of the vast majority of American voters as the "mainstream position." The B-H Report single-handedly cancelled out the results of the last election by purporting to identify as the "center" a position which is squarely at odds with the emphatically anti-war views of the American public that is the real mainstream.
UPDATE III: Meteor Blades has a brilliant essay from the perspective of his Vietnam generation over at DailyKos. It's long and deep and focuses on the deaths of so many young Americans. Here's a bit:
What the Baker-Hamilton Commission has delivered is a fragment of truth together with yet another version of the apocryphal pottery barn rule, the message we've received for two-plus years from various parts of the political spectrum: "you break it, you own it." In short, we're told once again, the U.S. dares not make a "precipitous" or "premature" withdrawal or redeployment of American forces because this would worsen the situation.
