Blumenthal: All the father's men

[kskiska]

Bush family guardians James Baker and others are trying to rescue "Sonny" from his failed Middle East policies. Will he listen this time?

By Sidney Blumenthal

Nov. 16, 2006 | Even before the electoral repudiation of President Bush, or "Sonny," as Colin Powell refers to him, the guardians of the Bush family trust surfaced as the presumptive executive committee of the executive branch. For years, Bush's father and his former national security team have attempted to rescue the president from himself -- and the clutches of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neoconservative centurions. Earlier this year the elder Bush quietly approached a retired four-star general to inquire whether he would be willing to replace Rumsfeld, but that premature coup came to naught. Several of the father's associates personally warned President Bush before the Iraq war that it would lead to sectarian civil war, only to be dismissed with disdain. Immediately after the invasion, James Baker said, "I told him not to do that," a friend of Baker's told me.

The elder Bush's former tennis doubles partner at Houston's exclusive Bayou Club and subsequently his campaign manager and secretary of state, charged for decades with cleaning up family messes, Baker is now chairman of the Iraq Study Group and has assumed the aura of a regent. He is burdened with more tasks than those specified in his commission's brief about Iraq. Not only is he developing a whole new U.S. foreign policy, he is trying to salvage whatever can be retrieved from the wreckage of Bush's presidency for its last two years -- and to prevent the Republican Party, already having lost the crown jewel of the Congress, from being permanently tainted.

It is as though a merciless, omniscient narrator has inserted him to undo and rectify everything at the end of a tragedy. F. Scott Fitzgerald, near the conclusion of "The Great Gatsby," described the reckless scions of privilege: "They were careless people ... They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

(snip)

Yet the neocons are still plotting to confound Baker. Clifford May, president of the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a member of the Iraq Study Group advisory panel, told me that ISG member Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan's former attorney general, will thwart consensus by opposing the ISG's recommendations.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/11/16/baker_rescue/

ON EDIT: Also in The Guardian as "The neocons' last stand"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1948810,00.html

[Erika]

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald nailed it. W was a rich elitist who simply

had no identification with the working class, and didn't want one. Total uncaring snob.

[qwlauren35]

2. As Bush presidents go,

The sequel was definitely a disappointment.