Middle East

Dec 1, 2006

Page 2 of 2
Bush holds his course
By Jim Lobe

the Weekly Standard and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, have carried out an increasingly intense public campaign against the ISG since Baker announced in mid-September that the group would meet with senior officials of both Iran and Syria.

Depicting any engagement with Iran or Syria as "appeasement" and "capitulation", these critics have warned that such a move would only encourage Islamist radicals - both Shi'ite and Sunni - and Israel's foes in the region and further diminish whatever

influence the US retains there.

"Reduced to its essence, the Baker-promoted regional strategy is a euphemism for throwing free Iraq to the wolves in its neighborhood," Frank Gaffney of the pro-Likud Center for Security Policy in the Washington Times wrote this week. "Among the other predictable casualties of the regional strategy will be the people of Israel."

Baker, who has been seen as the architect of what has been described as a "realist" makeover of the administration's foreign-policy apparatus, has naturally rejected these attacks. "In my view, it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," he said in October.

But they may yet be hitting home with Bush, who apparently is not yet ready to accept the increasingly widely held view that Washington's position in Iraq and the region as a whole has become so weak that without some help from Damascus and Tehran, it will be unable to stop a full-blown civil war that could well spread beyond Iraq's borders.

That may in fact have been the conclusion of State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, a longtime Rice collaborator and influential "realist" strategist who, like Baker, has advocated greater flexibility in Washington's diplomatic stance on a range of issues, particularly in the Middle East and Northeast Asia. To virtually everyone's surprise, Zelikow announced this week that he would return to his teaching post at the University of Virginia on January 1.

While Zelikow insisted that his decision was due primarily to financial factors, some analysts suggested that someone with his ambition must have been discouraged by the prospects for seeing his ideas accepted.

"My hunch as to the real reason that he is leaving is that he is fed up with having all the reasonable/constructive ideas in the administration and having little clout to implement them with 'Cheney's gang' shutting him and the Rice team down so frequently," said Steven Clemons, head of the American Strategy project at the New America Foundation.

(Inter Press Service)

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