Been There, Done That (Baker Commission) By Howard Kurtz --WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/12/01/BL2006120100367_pf.html

Been There, Done That

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 1, 2006; 8:00 AM



It sure feels like the Baker commission has come and gone, doesn't it?

It's an only-in-Washington phenomenon: A bipartisan group of wise men is assembled to solve a problem. A huge publicity buildup surrounds their deliberations. At the height of this speculation sweepstakes, their recommendations dribble out through leaks. These proposals get dissected and denounced by just about everyone, even though panel members haven't uttered a word in public. And now, when the group's report finally comes out next week, it will feel not just like old news but non-news. I mean, why even cover it? We've already had the debate and pronounced the Baker-Hamilton venture a failure.

Of course, it doesn't help that the president seems to have foreclosed most of what this outfit, headed by his father's Secretary of State, is going to push.

This whole notion of outsourcing foreign policy has always seemed kinda weird. Isn't that what we pay our politicians for? But even stranger is debating these leaked findings. In fact, we've been awash in leaks this week. Steve Hadley's leaked memo about what the White House really thinks of the Iraqi PM kind of undercut Bush's assurances at yesterday's meeting. Is his full confidence in Nouri al-Maliki akin to his full confidence in Don Rumsfeld a week before the election?

It's almost as if the real action of the Iraq Study Grope takes place among the chattering classes, and then Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton et al stage a reprise for the television cameras.

Besides, W. is already preempting the commission:

"President Bush said Thursday that American troops would stay in Iraq unless its government asks them to leave, using a joint news conference with the Iraqi prime minister to push back against a reported decision by an independent bipartisan panel to call for a gradual withdrawal," says the New York Times.

And there was this: "The president, who returned to Washington later on Thursday, sought to play down tensions between him and Mr. Maliki, calling the prime minister 'the right guy for Iraq.'"

Except that the Hadley memo pretty much called him the wrong guy.

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Bush v. Baker

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, November 30, 2006; 1:02 PM



The conventional wisdom in the immediate aftermath of the mid-term election was that President Bush -- humbled by a vote of no confidence, hobbled by a deepening crisis in Iraq -- would turn away from the neoconservatism of Vice President Cheney and the hyper-partisanship of Karl Rove.

It was said that he would turn to his father's team. There was to be a course correction, in Iraq and elsewhere.

But the conventional wisdom may have underestimated the president's stubbornness -- and Cheney and Rove's tenacity.

Because at today's press conference in Jordan, following his abbreviated meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Bush made it abundantly clear that he is waving off the rescue attempt by longtime Bush family fixer James A. Baker III. He'd rather stay the course.

News reports this morning indicate that Baker's bipartisan Iraq Study Group will next week officially recommend a gradual pullback of American troops from Iraq.

But in Amman, Bush went out of his way to mock the notion of a "graceful exit" -- and to insist that he's in Iraq for the long haul. "This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all," Bush said.

In recent days, the president has also made clear that he will not heed the commission's other major anticipated recommendation: That he engage in a more aggressive diplomatic effort with Iraq's neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria. Cheney is said to be particularly adamant on that issue, and Bush says it's a non-starter.

So that would appear to leave only one significant area of agreement between Bush and the Baker commission: A shift in American emphasis from combat operations to training and advising Iraqi units.

But attempts to train Iraqi forces thus far have repeatedly failed -- or worse, backfired. (See, for instance, Washington Post stories by Thomas E. Ricks and Walter Pincus.)

And in the greater scheme of things -- with Iraq wracked by a horribly violent civil war, the American death toll rising, and an angry electorate demanding an exit strategy -- a shift of that sort risks coming off as nothing more than tinkering.

Bush, of course, could still change his mind. All we know is that he hasn't done so yet.