Butcher, Baker: The neo-cons' new
villain By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - From having read the
neo-conservative press in the US over the past
month, one would think that former secretary of
state James Baker poses the biggest threat to the
United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein.
As the realist of US Middle East policy
who once had the temerity to threaten to withhold
US aid guarantees from Israel if right-wing prime
minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the
1991
Madrid Conference, Baker has
long been seen by neo-conservatives, as well as
the Christian Right, as close to the devil
himself.
But his role as co-chairman and
presumed eminence grise of the bipartisan
Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose long-awaited
recommendations on how the US can best extract
itself from a war that the neo-conservatives did
so much to incite was to be released in Washington
on Wednesday, has provoked a new campaign of
vilification of the kind that they normally
reserve for the "perfidious" French.
The
specific aim of the campaign - which has been
waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of
the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and
the online and printed versions of The Weekly
Standard and The National Review - has been to
discredit the ISG's presumed conclusions, even
before they are published.
Its
recommendations, general and remarkably vague
accounts of which have appeared in the New York
Times and the Washington Post, reportedly include
a gradual reduction in the US combat role in Iraq
in favor of a much bigger effort at training and
strengthening Iraq's army. It is a strategy that
the military brass appear to have already adopted
and that ISG consultants have said could reduce
the number of US troops there from about 140,000
today to 70,000 in 2008.
On the other
hand, neo-conservatives, backed by Senator John
McCain among others, favor a "surge" of as many as
50,000 more troops to stabilize the country. They
have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of
President George W Bush's dream of democratizing
Iraq and the region, leaving their harshest
attacks for the ISG's anticipated call for
Washington seriously to engage Syria and Iran, as
well as Iraq's other neighbors, as part of its
diplomatic strategy.
Baker himself
telegraphed this aspect of his approach after
meeting with Damascus' foreign minister and
Tehran's United Nations ambassador, Mohammed Javad
Zarif, who reports directly to Iran's supreme
leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei. "In my
view, it's not appeasement to talk to your
enemies," Baker said.
Those remarks set
off a tidal wave of protest and criticism,
beginning with the published announcement in The
Weekly Standard by Michael Rubin, a fellow at the
neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), that he had resigned from an "expert
working group" advising the ISG. Rubin accused
Baker and his Democratic co-chair, former
congressman Lee Hamilton, of having "gerrymandered
[the] advisory panels to ratify predetermined
recommendations" - panels, he noted, that included
Middle East experts who had actually opposed the
Iraq war.
In a preview of attacks that
appeared with increasing frequency over the
following month, Rubin also assailed Baker for
what he called the former secretary of state's
"legacy" in the Middle East - namely, his approval
of the 1989 Taif Accords that "sacrificed Lebanese
independence" to Syria and his "betrayal" of
Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels after the first Gulf
War.
Rubin was quickly followed by Eliot
Cohen, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, who, writing in the Wall Street Journal,
mocked the ISG as a "collection of worthies
commissioned by Congress that has spent several
days in Iraq, chiefly in the Green Zone".
"To think that either [Syria or Iran],
with remarkable records of violence, duplicity and
hostility to the US, will rescue us bespeaks a
certain willful blindness," Cohen wrote.
The campaign against Baker and the ISG
heated up after the November 7 Democratic victory
followed by the resignation of Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Robert
Gates, an ISG member who two years ago had called
for negotiations with Tehran.
The Journal
published a series of harsh attacks in
mid-November by both Rubin and columnist Bret
Stephens on Baker and other alumni, such as Gates,
who held top posts in the realist-dominated
administration of president George H W Bush.
In an appeal to "progressives" who had
opposed the realism of the administrations of both
Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr, Rubin noted that Baker
served as Reagan's chief of staff and Gates as his
deputy director of central intelligence when
Washington sided with Saddam Hussein in the
Iran-Iraq War and "sent people across the Third
World to their graves in the cause of US national
interest".
The following day, Stephens
blamed Baker for forcing Israel to take part in
the Madrid conference, "which set the groundwork
for the Oslo Accords [which] for Israel ... meant
more terrorism, culminating in the second
intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant
repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass
radicalization in the movement of Hamas".
Things got even more personal with columns
by Frank Gaffney, president of the
neo-conservative Center for Security Policy, and
Mark Steyn in the Washington Times suggesting that
Baker's thinking was motivated as much by
anti-Semitism as by realism.
"Jim Baker's
hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record
and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the
region," wrote Gaffney, suggesting that the ISG -
which, in another column published on Tuesday, he
called the "Iraq Surrender Group" - would
recommend a regional approach similar to Madrid
that would "throw free Iraq to the wolves" and
"allow the Mideast's only bona fide democracy, the
Jewish state, to be snuffed in due course".
Indeed, the past week has witnessed a
veritable orgy of Baker- and ISG-bashing,
beginning with a Weekly Standard article by former
Republican House of Representatives Speaker and
AEI fellow Newt Gingrich that warned that "any
proposal to ask Iran and Syria to help is a sign
of defeat" and "appeasement".
At the same
time, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer,
an Iraq war hawk who has blamed Washington's
troubles in that country on the Iraqis themselves,
resurrected the charge that "Baker gave Lebanon
over to Syria as a quid pro quo" for its
backing in the 1991 Gulf War and mocked the notion
that "Iran and Syria have an interest in stability
in Iraq".
For sheer consistency, however,
The Weekly Standard, which in this week's edition
featured no fewer than three articles denouncing
the ISG - including one that described the
commission's membership as "deeply reactionary"
and the "Kmart version of the Congress of Vienna"
(Kmart is a US chain of bargain department stores)
- has led the field.
In successive lead
editorials by chief editor William Kristol and
Robert Kagan, the magazine first assailed the
notion that Washington should engage Syria and
Iran as "capitulation", and then, reassured by
Bush's declaration last week that he was not
prepared to follow the ISG's advice on talking
with either Damascus or Tehran, accused Baker of
having "quite deliberately created ... the
disastrous impression ... that the United States
is about to withdraw from Iraq".
"At home
and abroad, people have been led to believe that
Jim Baker and not the president was going to call
the shots in Iraq from now on. Happily, that is
not the case," wrote Kagan and Kristol, who
recently called Bush "the last neo-con in power".
