The Iraq Study Group: let's see it for what it is

A scene from the Crusades

Andrew Bacevich gets it right in Iraq panel's real agenda: damage control Christian Science Monitor 11/28/06:

Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipartisan panel of Wise Men (and one woman) can't really be searching for truth. It is engaged in damage control.

I saw someone who wrote that the ISG, aka, the Baker-Hamilton commission, may be the strangest way a great power ever tried to negotiate a retreat.

Bacevich has worked out a sytematic view of US foreign policy, particularly when it comes to military intervention. And he's very skeptical of those. He's right when he says:

Their purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.

The election this year represented a slap up side the head for the Congress, the Presidency and the neocons, but also for the broader foreign policy establishment. Public opinion on the war long since had turned to opposition to the war and supporting a relatively quick withdrawal. It happened because lots of people understood over months and years what a mess this thing had become. And because the antiwar movement, which a large part of our "press corps" still doesn't think exists, kept raising the issues that needed to be faced.

The last thing that Jim Baker and his business associates at the Carlyle Group want is a public that seriously engaged with major foreign policy issues. And certainly not a public that takes regular notice that both our political and military leaders are willing to bald-faced lie about national-security issues. They certainly don't want ordinary citizens to start focusing on boondoggles like Star Wars/Missile Defense/Whatever Propaganda Name They Call It Now.

Others have notice this as well, but it's worth repeating: as Bacevich writes, that of all the members of this commission that's going to provide the Secret Plan to End the War, "None possesses specialized knowledge of Islam or the Middle East."

He's also willing to project several things that the ISG report will not include:

The guardians of the foreign policy status quo are counting on the panel to extricate the US from Iraq. More broadly, they are counting on it to avoid inquiring into the origins of our predicament. So don't think for a moment that the ISG will assess the implications of America's growing addiction to foreign oil. Don't expect it to question the wisdom of President Bush's doctrine of preventive war or the feasibility of his Freedom Agenda, which promises to implant democracy across the Islamic world.

Far be it from the group to ask whether an open-ended "global war on terror" makes sense as a response to 9/11 or to ponder the flagrant manipulation and misuse of intelligence in the months leading up to the Iraq war. The ISG won't assess the egregious flaws in US military planning for the Iraq invasion or the manifest deficiencies in American generalship since the war began. On the role that Congress has played in enabling presidential fecklessness, you can be certain that Baker and Hamilton will remain silent. (my emphasis)

This Baker commission is a scam. I don't see any reason why critics of the Iraq War should view it with anything but the greatest suspicion.