Fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the Iraq war away

Bush's Iraq disaster is taking the GOP down, and his father's old pal James Baker is about to tell him what to do.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: James Baker, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

Oct. 17, 2006 | In perhaps the strangest vindication of that old '60s chestnut "The personal is the political," the fate of America's Iraq adventure may hinge on whether George W. Bush can handle being taken to the woodshed by an emissary of his old man.

For Bush, the day of reckoning is at hand. After years of talking tough, smearing war opponents as appeasers and demanding "total victory," he must confront the fact that his Iraq war has been a catastrophic failure. Terror attacks are up, American casualties are soaring near record levels, and a credible study claims that at least several hundred thousand Iraqis have died as a result of the war, demolishing whatever moral rationale it had. Of more immediate concern to Bush, Americans have turned against the Iraq war so strongly that the issue now threatens to take down Bush's party, not just in the midterms but in 2008 as well. After a brief uptick in the polls driven by a major GOP "war on terror" P.R. campaign in September, Bush's ratings have again dropped into the low 30s, and with the Republicans reeling from the Mark Foley scandal and no hope on Iraq's bloody horizon, they will probably continue to fall. The Democrats look increasingly likely to take back the House, and perhaps the Senate too.

The country is at a tipping point, which could be described as the moment when even those Americans who get all their information from Fox News abandon Bush's sinking ship. GOP leaders know that if the U.S. is still bogged down in Iraq in 2008, their chances of capturing the presidency will be severely lessened. Senior GOP leaders like John Warner are firing warning shots across Bush's bow. He is under increasing pressure to do something -- anything -- to stop the bleeding.

But Bush, declaring that nothing less than the freedom of the world is at stake, has continued to insist that only a total victory in Iraq is acceptable. In a speech on Sept. 4, he said, "we'll accept nothing less than complete victory ... We're on the offensive, and we will not rest, we will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight, until this threat to civilization has been removed." On Monday, he assured Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that he will not pull U.S. troops out of the country.

The Republican Party brain trust, such as it is, desperately needs to find a way to talk Bush off the ledge, pry him away from his neocon delusions and Darth Cheney, and persuade him to cut his losses. But how?

Enter James Baker, GOP wise man and old Bush family counselor. Baker, who served as the elder Bush's secretary of state and secretary of treasury, is a consummate fix-it man, a kind of cross between Tom Hagen, Michael Corleone's consigliere in "The Godfather," and Mr. Wolf, the hipster cleanup dude in "Pulp Fiction." It was Baker who pulled Bush's chestnuts out of the fire after the 2000 elections, when he appeared on television to declaim, with the icy authority of a junta colonel, that "the votes have been counted again and again."

Now Baker has put on his bipartisan hat to co-head the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission of foreign-policy experts that was created by Congress in March, with Bush's approval, to look for new solutions to the Iraq mess. The commission is not releasing its report until after the November elections, implausibly claiming that it doesn't want to politicize them. But a leak campaign to the media has made it pretty clear what the report is going to say -- and it is not going to be music to Bush's ears.

Baker's report, according to reports in the New York Sun and the Sunday Times, will rule out the possibility of "victory" in Iraq. Instead, it will recommend that the U.S. either simply withdraw or try to cut some kind of deal with the insurgents that could provide a modicum of security and stability in the country. The United States should abandon dreams of democracy. Instead, it should search for anything that will minimize the damage -- whether installing a strongman or a junta, or splitting the country into three parts. It should negotiate with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria. Left unspoken is the obvious larger point: The U.S. mission has failed, and once we do everything we can to prevent Iraq from descending into a hellish civil war, we should get out.

For Bush, the Baker report will be about as welcome as an invitation to attend a two-week Earth First teach-in in Berkeley. Following these recommendations would mean changing his policy in radical and humiliating ways. No matter how he tries to spin it, pulling U.S. troops out when Iraq is still in meltdown will make his policy indistinguishable from the one proposed by Democrats -- and which he, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been virulently denouncing as appeasement and surrender to evildoers. Having just claimed that the war in Iraq is "the calling of our generation" and the equivalent of World War II, it's going to be hard for Bush to suddenly say, "Never mind!"

Even worse, there is no guarantee that any of these new tactics would work -- in fact, they could easily make things even worse.

In short, Baker's report will be a heaping plate of crow. The big question is: Will Bush be able to bring himself to eat it -- especially since it's being served up by an emissary of his father?

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