The Baker Commission - Looking Forward in Anger

From what we know so far, the Baker Commission is going to recommend that we cut troop levels in Iraq, attempt to make nicey-nice with our determined enemies in Iran and Syria, and demand Israeli concessions to serve as the deus ex machina to bring about peace in our time. In a word, oy vey!

Coming from a commission headed by James Baker, the latter recommendation is especially jarring. During his tenure as Secretary of State, I believe his most famous quote regarding Israel and the Jews was (and pardon his French), “Fuck the Jews. They didn’t vote for us anyway.”

Whether or not Baker is an anti-Semite or merely a non-comprehending putz is a disputable but largely academic matter. A report from America’s putative best minds that focuses on the six million Jews in the region rather than the one billion Muslims is fatally suspect. Of course, it’s more politically expedient and just plain easier to focus on the Jews. Regardless of what idiocies the Baker Commission pukes out, our government won’t have to put itself on alert for a gaggle of flying rabbis determined to terrify airliners.

THERE’S SO MUCH THAT JIM BAKER doesn’t understand and never has understood; I honestly don’t know where to begin. Perhaps a good place to start would be in 1941 when the Palestinian leader, Mufti al-Husseini, journeyed to Berlin and aligned himself, his people and his movement with the Nazi agenda of annihilating the Jews. Since that time (which was actually seven years before Israel was born), extermination of the Zionist Entity and those inside of it, not any kind of peace agreement, has been the lodestar of the Radical Muslim world. To think that this leopard is suddenly going to change its spots or be satisfied with a Sudentenland-sized chunk of Israel is ludicrous. When Ahmadenijad said he wanted to wipe Israel off the map, he meant it.

Aaah, Ahmadenijad. What does this man have to do to convince our country that he means business? Last night, John Kerry was on Larry King (there’s a convergence of some sort). Kerry was fresh from having testified before the Baker Commission. Why the Baker Commission needed the insights of this particular Senator will be yet another mystery of our era for historians to unravel.

Kerry seemed quite satisfied with what the Baker Commission was going to recommend. He seemed especially tickled that the Commission was poised to seek a diplomatic settlement with Iran and Syria to bring about peace in the Middle East. The fact that a diplomatic settlement with these nations would depend on the good faith of their lunatic leaders either doesn’t bother or fails to register with the Kerry and the Commission.

Perhaps the most disturbing and most dispiriting aspect of the entire Baker Commission exercise is that it represents a distinctly post 9/11 view of things, but that the commission and apparently great swaths of our government have learned all the wrong lessons from that day. Bad generals always fight the last war, and 9/11 was the last war.

Let me explain: It’s not terrorism that’s our biggest problem, but hostile regimes. Donald Rumsfeld went on TV the weekend after 9/11 and characterized it as a battle in a new kind of war, a battle that we had lost. This was a fruitful way to look at things. In the epochal clash whose arrival was heralded on that day, the losses suffered on 9/11 by historical and future standards were a pinprick.

I don’t mean that disrespectfully. I cried that day, and cried again a week later when my wife and I attended the funeral of a close friend of hers. But 9/11 signaled the start of a long war with implacable foes. And the losses of 9/11, while shocking, were nothing compared to the losses suffered in London during the blitz let alone those suffered contemporaneously in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The larger point is that 9/11 showed the maximum of what maniacs can accomplish with guile, a little money and an impoverished regime providing them safe haven. Compared to what maniacs will be able to accomplish with hundreds of billions of petro-dollars while running regimes flush with cash and having a limitless desire for martyrdom and murder, 9/11’s damage comes into a different, sharper focus.

WE KNOW WHO’S GOING to love the Baker Commission recommendations. The Democrats at home who think getting out of Iraq is the only thing that matters will jump aboard the report as an intellectual life raft. Bereft of any ideas of their own for the past five years, Democrats will seize on the report as cover for getting our illiterate children in the armed forces home.

But the Iranian mullahs will be even happier. The Baker Commission report will give them the same feeling that Hitler got in Munich – these men will not fight. They will see a solid chunk of the American body politic eager to sell out an ally while making concessions to our enemies without requiring those enemies to fire a single shot.

But here’s the killer part: Even if President Bush does the right thing and shoves this report in a part of James Baker’s anatomy where the sun don’t shine, the Commission will still do incalculable harm. The media, the Democrats and even many Republicans have already given the Baker Commission the sheen of omniscience once wrongly bestowed upon the 9/11 Commission. Regardless of the obtuseness of the Baker Commission’s recommendations, they will be hailed as genius and indisputable by wide swaths of the public.

Our country will look ridiculous. And a country like ours can’t afford to look ridiculous. Or weak. Especially at this point in history.

The Baker/Hamilton Commission report on Iraq, based on its composition, should cause us to expect obfuscation, suppression and fabrication to dominate text for findings and recommendations. What other outcome could obtain when 8 of 10 members started professional life as lawyers, and two went on to become elected officials? The two former Secretaries of State should advocate traditional foreign policy models allowing us to escape commitment in self-congratulatory, affirming ways through brilliant interpretations of national interest, multi-lateralism, exit strategy, and re-deployment. Notice police, intelligence, and military professionals, who could assess terrorist actions and Iraqi capabilities for stability and security, were excluded from leadership roles.

If such professionals serving as subordinates submit observations and recommendations, those become subject to filtering and editing by leaders accustomed to logics earning the United States distinction for abandoning allies at strategic moments. During the Cold War examples included Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Cuba, and Lebanon. More recently the Georgetown et al brotherhood enabled focus upon Academy Awards and Super Bowl, and away from over 2 million deaths in Bosnia, Lebanon, Somalia, Basra and southern Iraq, Sudan and Rwanda.

Ten’s of million Iraqi’s have sacrificed for an elected government, constitutional referendum, and, physical reconstruction, and have now convicted Saddam Hussein of capital crimes. They must now consider abandonment by people accustomed to embracing sophisticated moral certainties enabling them to turn a blind eye, and agonize over the resultant human loses from afar.

Well, Bill O'Reilly said it best tonight at the beginning of his show... we pull out of Iraq or give Iran say over what happens there, then Iran basically takes control over the Middle East and the oil there and if they want $100 a barrel they will demand it and everyone else will follow like nice little sheep -- especially once Iran has the Nuke for certain. Pretty strong stuff out of Mr. O'Reilly trying to wake the sheeple up and tell them why we have to grow backbones.

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