For this we waited all these months? (RW warning)

The report of the Iraq Study Group is not exactly a strategy for unconditional surrender, but it's what you get from an expensive corporation lawyer trained never to let conviction, purpose or principle get in the way of a settlement that will stay together at least until the lawyers cash their checks. It was all in a day's work for Jim Baker.

Mr. Baker is a favorite target of the tabloids, inevitably portrayed as vain, pompous, arrogant and eager to settle scores. The New York Post couldn't wait to have a little clean fun, transposing the heads of Mr. Baker and his fellow conspirator-in-mischief, Lee Hamilton, onto the heads of a couple of simians and headlining it: "Surrender Monkeys."

When someone couldn't wait to show the front page to him, the former secretary of state (for President George H.W. Bush) looked at it with icy hauteur, as if it were a trail of toilet paper someone tracked out of the men's room, and replied: "Lovely. If we're getting attacked by this rag, you know we're doing something right."

But it wasn't just "this rag," a "rag" friendly to the president's interests. A chorus of others, including the occasional Democrat, regard the work of the Baker-Hamilton panel as a feeler for surrender. The closer someone looks at the fine print, in fact, the more theological it looks -- not the work of "realists" but the predictable spin of partisan advocates. The Arab press loves it already, and why not? Mustafa Bakri, the editor of the Cairo tabloid al-Osboa, gleefully says the report signals "the end of America." Mr. Bakri, like Jim Baker, admires Syrian President Bashar Assad, and urges Mr. Assad and his Arab brothers to "capture the moment as America now is in its weakest period." The headline in a competing Cairo daily, al-Wafd, declares "Bush confesses defeat in Iraq." What it means, the editor said, "is the real end of Bush rule, his policies and the neoconservative groups." The Beirut daily al-Akhbar calls the Baker-Hamilton effort a "holocaust for American claims."