That Iraq Report? More of the Same

Baker-Hamilton blew off those questions, and it's no wonder, because no one in Washington wants to deal with them. The Republicans don't want to agree to a withdrawal timetable because it's an admission of defeat and policy failure, while the Democrats don't want to be the first to call for a withdrawal because they're afraid of being pilloried in the next election season for a lack of toughness. Both sides are afraid of being responsible for a civil war bloodbath if the U.S. troops pull out, and neither side wants to be the first to suggest taking the humiliating step of inviting Syria or Iran to the negotiating table with anything like equal status.

Baker-Hamilton takes all of this into account, offering no concrete or controversial suggestions that would bind either party to unpopular action in the near future. In essence, all Baker-Hamilton accomplished was a very vague admission that Bush's Iraq adventure is somehow irrevocably fucked and that we have to get our troops out of that country as soon as possible, a conclusion that was obvious to the entire world two long years ago. But even this pathetically timid intellectual assertion was deemed too controversial to risk unveiling before the 2006 midterm elections, and it's obvious now that both parties have decided to wait until 2008 to deal with the more important questions of "when" and "how."

In the midst of all of the recent fanfare about Baker-Hamilton, some of the actual actors in the Iraq disaster have been using the media to similarly absolve themselves of any responsibility to act. We started to see this happening on November 15, when Michael Gordon of The New York Times (who seems to be spending a lot of time fellating intelligence officials lately) ran a ponderous "news analysis" suggesting that a rapid withdrawal might not be the best idea (" Get Out Now? Not So Fast, Some Experts Say," Nov. 15). In this piece, a host of military and intelligence officials argued vociferously that America's problems in Iraq stemmed from not having enough troops, and that an early withdrawal would accelerate the country's decline into civil war. Among the voices quoted in Gordon's piece is former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, who as Jeff Cohen noted was one of the chief pom-pom wavers for the war before the invasion and one of the many experts who insisted that Iraq possessed WMDs. Gordon conveniently left Pollack's record on that score out of the article.

Pollack and other officials like former Central Command head Anthony Zinni furthermore argue in the Gordon piece that what is needed now is an increase in troops in the next six months to "regain momentum" as part of a broader effort to stabilize Iraq.

A few weeks later, Gordon ran another piece (" Bush Adviser's Memo Cites Doubts About Iraqi Leader," Nov. 29) which contained a leak of a memo by National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley which basically expressed doubts that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is capable of doing much of anything to control sectarian violence in Iraq.