GW's Future Brain - the Baker Commission?

[101Scout]

This has been on my mind for several days now since the '06 elections and since James Baker and daddy Bush is, once again, another emergency team insurtion advocating decision making ideas for der Goober Bush to save it's sorry face before the Americans after 6 disasterous years ..... my new thinking is ..... just how much of this possibly became the (GOP) plan long before this past '06 election?

Granted, the Dems kicked ass in this election. But how many new (and old) faces in Congress may now be working with the new Bush Brain'storm' version by the Baker Commission in which those 'elect' faces (who scrounged up a lot of conservative voters) helped them to get into office. What magical 'tricks' is this 'Commission' going to conjure up that will attempt to make GW Bush and the GOP look like winners prior to the '08 elections under the Dem umbrella in Congress?

Lets start off with Michael Kinsley's words of wisdom about the Baker Commission.



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November 13, 2006

So which is the Baker commission? It's got elements of both. Part of the idea, certainly, was to get the politicians over the hump of the election, and give them something to say in the meanwhile. ("We desperately need new ideas and fresh thinking about Iraq, and indeed the entire Middle East. I look forward to the recommendations of the Baker Commission and urge them to interpret their mandate widely and boldly.") And part of the idea is to legitimise some currently unpalatable solution. But the Baker commission may be near-unique in that there is no obvious solution waiting to be imposed. People actually hope that the greybeards will come up with something that no one has previously thought of.

Good luck. The chance that this group of aging brahmins will come up with something original is not enormous. It's a nutty, and not very attractive, idea to turn an urgent issue of war and peace over to a commission. Commissions have usually been trotted out for long-run social problems: immigration, debt, health care. Going to war is something that ought to be decided by the people we elect. Congress in recent decades has virtually abandoned its duty under the Constitution to make the decisions about when American soldiers are sent to kill and die. Presidents have foolishly claimed that authority. And now, inevitably, we have a president who is stuck with a war that he insisted on and a citizenry that has no interest in it.

If we had wanted our country to be run by James Baker, we had our chance. He considered running for president in 1996, but discovered that his interest in a James Baker presidency was not widely shared. Although he has held a variety of government posts, from deputy secretary of commerce under Ford to secretary of state under Bush the Elder, and has all the trappings of enormous consequence and wisdom, such as a Presidential Medal of Freedom and his own Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, Baker is essentially a political operative. His place in history is Florida 2000, where he secured the presidency for George W Bush. Reporters were awed by his brilliance and ruthlessness. History may be less admiring of his willingness to make inconsistent arguments and to lie with a straight face.

Being a Washington Wise Man does not require much wisdom. Baker has a "conviction", said a colleague in the Washington Post on Sunday, "that Iraq is the central foreign policy issue confronting the United States." Wow. Now there's an insight. Actually, it is a nice small insight into the Baker mentality that he apparently can imagine a war that is killing young Americans by the hundreds every month but is not our central foreign policy issue.

Baker also believes that "the only way to to address that issue successfully is to first build a bipartisan consensus." Now that is a conviction you can sink your teeth into. People like Baker always favor a bipartisan consensus. They don't really believe in politics, which is to say they don't really believe in democracy.

[101Scout]

This piece comes from a .com Jewish review that comments on the Baker Commission and Bush I that has also failed before concerning peace in the ME. Just as I have commented about any of our invasions across the pond since the last 50+ years, there's a US no win scenario with all of it. Only the war profiteers wins.

So, given that GW came into office with a loser brain, now enters the expert and proven loser NeoCon minds of Bush I and James Baker to lead GW and America further into its demise.


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Nov. 22, 2006 / 1 Kislev, 5767

Recycled Trash Makes Poor Policy

[Only registered and activated users can see links] | With the Republican defeat in the congressional midterm elections and the widespread perception that America is losing in Iraq, the notion that the Bush foreign-policy doctrine is now officially dead has moved from theory to fact.

Many of the so-called neocons — the architects of this ambitious strategy — are leaving or have left their posts, and the return of the "realists" is widely predicted. The convening of an Iraq-policy study group led by former Secretary of State James Baker and others, such as former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, is seen as merely the process by which the administration of Bush the younger will give way to the wiser, supposedly more realistic heads that ran things during the administration of Bush the elder.


This will all presumably mean a return to a belief in engagement with evil regimes, such as those of terrorist-sponsoring Syria and an Islamist Iranian regime whose apocalyptic nuclear ambitions are no secret.


Charged with finding a way out of Iraq, the Baker group is believed to be ready to recommend, not only an olive branch for Iran, but pressure on Israel. Only by satisfying the Arabs on Israel, it is thought, can America find a way to exit Iraq.


REALISM NOT SO REALISTIC

The return of Baker, as well as the Saudi, plan should be setting off alarms among those who have been Bush's chief critics. The pessimists about democracy and Iraq turned out to be right about the administration's blithe dismissal of the perils of its idealism. But history did not begin or end with the last few years. If the neocon strategy made sense, it was chiefly because the Bakerite realism had failed disastrously in the preceding decades.


Is our collective attention span so short that we have forgotten how a policy of relying on supposedly stable and authoritarian Arab regimes got us in the mess that led to the 9/11 attacks? And did the pre-George W. Bush decades of American pressure on Israel to make concessions lead to peace or even moderate Palestinian demands? Clearly not, as the historic blunder that was the Oslo peace process proved.


Every step back from an aggressive support of Israeli self-defense will be rightly perceived as a victory for Arab extremists who will be emboldened to commit more violence, not less.


Even an all-out American betrayal of Israel — something that neither the Bush White House nor the Democratic Congress would countenance — would not help us out of our Iraqi pickle. Islamists there aren't fighting for a Palestinian state or even just for the extermination of the Jewish state. They want much more, and are honest enough to tell us as much if only we will listen.


The truth is that while the George W. Bush doctrine may have failed, it was no more or less of a failure than that which preceded it. And, despite many well-aimed barbs about Iraq, none of Bush's critics seem to have a viable alternative concept to deal with Iran, the Palestinians or Iraq.