James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab.

[Tin Man]

I found this article by the Rolling Stone national security writer to be very interesting... It appears that James Baker III, once again, has been summoned to clean-up another mess for the BFEE. Ostensibly, JB3 is tasked with chairing a commission (the Iraq Study Group) tasked with researching alternative strategies for exiting Iraq. However, it would seem the ISG might be 'dual purpose' in its mission: defining a new Iraq strategy (and selling it to the recalcitrant GWB) would allow the Republican Party to distance themselves from what has clearly become an albatross around their collective necks: W's disasterous 'stay the course' strategy for Iraq and its clear potential to allow Democrats to recapture the Congress (and perhaps the presidency in 2008).

A Higher Power - James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab.

By Robert Dreyfuss for Washington Monthly
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Amid the highly charged political infighting in Washington over what to do in Iraq, you might be excused for not noticing that a bipartisan commission quietly started work last spring with a mandate to help the Bush administration rethink its policy toward the war. Of course, anything labeled "bipartisan commission" seems almost guaranteed to be ignored by a highly partisan White House that is notoriously hostile to outside advice and famously devoted to "staying the course." But what makes this particular commission hard to dismiss is that it is led by perhaps the one man who might be able to break through the tight phalanx of senior officials who advise the president and filter his information. That person is the former secretary of state, Republican insider, and consigliere of the Bush family, James A. Baker III.

Since March, Baker, backed by a team of experienced national-security hands, has been busily at work trying to devise a fresh set of policies to help the president chart a new course in--or, perhaps, to get the hell out of--Iraq. But as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work as well. "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008. "I guess there are people in the party, on the Hill and in the White House, who see a political train wreck coming, and they've called in Baker to try to reroute the train."

...

It's hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. The 60 people involved in the effort have been instructed, in the strongest of terms, not to comment to reporters on the task force's work. Every one of the participants I spoke to flatly refused to comment for the record, and several did not want to talk even off the record. Some were palpably nervous. "We're not allowed to talk about it," said one person involved. "We get about every month a warning: 'Do not discuss in any context the substance of what is happening in this group.' You know how bad it is? Initially they wanted us to end all of our contacts with the media, make no statements, write no op-eds--in other words, become monks. Then they realized, how can you take the entire community of Iraq experts in the United States and have them all stop talking?"

Baker's commission--officially called the Iraq Study Group--was created in March by Congress at the instigation of Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican. After his third trip to Iraq last year, Wolf started contacting members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, urging the creation of a high-powered, private task force to take a fresh look at the mess in Iraq. "If you had a very serious illness...and you weren't completely comfortable that everything was going the way you hoped, you'd certainly want to get a second opinion," Wolf told me. At least 30 members of Congress supported the idea, including Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.). According to participants in the task force, a key silent partner with Wolf in putting it together was his Virginia Republican colleague, Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services committee.

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full article at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0609.dreyfuss.html

[C_U_L8R]

1. Baker should let go of Iraq

and put Bush in rehab.

(speaking of rehab,,, where's Pickles gone to ??)

[saltpoint]

2. Baker is a capable man, in a relentlessly sinister sort of way, but

I'm not sure even he can fix Iraq.

Rubble, black smoke, a professional class fleeing for their lives, and swiftly eroding support for what is obviously a huge failure.

Baker is the man who shut things down in Florida for BFEE after the 2000 debacle. If he cannot fix Junior's immoral failures, he gets what he pays for.

You ordered it, Jim. You eat it.

[ProSense]

3. Exactly!

Commit, no, jail them all, the criminal bastards!