President Bush won his first skirmish with the Iraq Study Group. James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the ISG directors, insisted the president adopt all 79 of its recommendations for changing policy in Iraq. Bush balked, and for good reason. A sizable chunk of the ISG’s advice–its call, for instance, for a new diplomatic outreach to Syria and Iran–is unrealistic and wrongheaded. Within 24 hours of the report’s release, Hamilton conceded he and Baker had never expected full compliance by Bush.
It was, however, a small triumph. The president faces significant hurdles in his effort to finesse the ISG report and the get-out-of-Iraq-now Democrats. Bush’s plan is twofold. First, while praising the ISG report, he’s already begun rejecting parts he doesn’t like, while other parts he’ll probably just ignore. Second, to quell Democratic (and media) opposition, he’ll invoke the ISG’s plea for bipartisanship and its support for “success” in Iraq.
Bush would no doubt have preferred to dismiss the report flatly, perhaps even contemptuously. He came to Washington six years ago with a strong desire to thumb his nose at the mandarins of the Washington establishment. And the ISG is a perfect embodiment of that establishment both in who’s on it and the type of advice it’s offering. But given his political weakness and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, Bush doesn’t have the option of snubbing the ISG.
Still, the private scorn among Bush aides for the ISG was hard to disguise. One administration official said a line in Eliot Cohen’s analysis of the ISG report in the Wall Street Journal captured his view. “A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results,” wrote Cohen, a military expert at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Fatuous or not, the ISG’s recommendations were typical of Washington’s elite class of former officials. The ISG’s ten members showed a utopian faith in diplomacy and negotiations, plus a fondness for regional conferences, especially dealing with the Middle East. They suggested, subtly but surely, that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is somehow relevant to fixing what’s wrong in Iraq and should be dealt with as one of the first orders of business. And, as Washington elites always do, they favored bipartisanship and a consensus approach. In fact, ISG members were downright self-congratulatory in talking about how well they got along with each other, in contrast to the partisanship that otherwise prevails in Washington.
The conceit of the panel was that Washington’s wise men would bail out an unsophisticated president from the consequences of his reckless intervention in Iraq that many of them, Baker included, opposed from the start. A further conceit was that a collection of old Washington hands, regardless of their specific qualifications, invariably knows better.
In a sense, the ISG report was payback. The group embraced the conventional wisdom in Washington that Bush has so often rebelled against. The emphasis of his foreign and national security policy on spreading democracy clashed with the establishment’s yearning for stability. Thus it’s not surprising the ISG report never cites “democracy” as a goal. But “stability” or a “stable” Iraq as an objective is cited more than 30 times.
And while the ISG endorsed an Iraq that can govern and defend itself and join the international war on terror, it failed to provide a strategy for achieving that goal. The ISG was far more interested in pointing the way for a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
A telling difference between the president and the ISG involves “victory” as the chief aim in Iraq. At a press conference last week with British prime minister Tony Blair, Bush said he and Blair “agree that victory in Iraq is important. It’s important for the Iraqi people. It’s important for the security of the United States and Great Britain, and it’s important for the civilized world.”
According to the Washington Post, “victory in Iraq” was initially one of four options that the ISG would explore. But it was quickly abandoned as a topic worth examining. And the word victory itself did not appear in the report except in reference to a possible al Qaeda victory.
Baker explained the absence of the word this way: “We stayed away from a lot of terms that have been bandied about during the campaign season and the political debate. You probably won’t find ‘civil war’ in here either. You won’t find ‘victory.’ But you will find ‘success.’ And so I think what our report says, on balance, if you read it, is that if you implement the recommendations we make, the chances for success in Iraq will be improved.”
The difference between success and victory is more than symbolic. Success is a flexible term. It could mean diminished violence or an undemocratic takeover of the Iraqi government by a strongman or a military leader or almost anything but a total takeover by terrorists and jihadists. Victory is far less equivocal. It means, in Iraq, the defeat of terrorists and antidemocratic forces.
The trickiest part of Bush’s plan is getting Democrats to live up to their promise to be bipartisan. After congressional leaders met with Bush last week, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said withdrawing troops from Iraq has to be the top priority. “We have got to start moving American troops, redeploying them out of Iraq, and start bringing them home,” he said. That’s not the path to victory or success–or to bipartisanship.
Next week Bush intends to address the nation with “a new approach” in Iraq. He’ll invoke the Iraq Study Group and accept many of its recommendations. He may approve a temporary increase in troops in Iraq, a step mentioned but not specifically endorsed by the ISG. Will this cause Durbin and antiwar Democrats to desist? Don’t hold your breath.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
