Reading major American newspapers is a bit like trying to decipher an archeological text written in a dead language. Well-informed reporters bring you the facts you need to know, but hemmed in by the canons of objective journalism, they can't quite express what they're trying to say. Thus the puzzling phenomenon of Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks' Reading major American newspapers is a bit like trying to decipher an archeological text written in a dead language. Well-informed reporters bring you the facts you need to know, but hemmed in by the canons of objective journalism, they can't quite express what they're trying to say. Thus the puzzling phenomenon of Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks' latest analysis of the Baker Hamilton Commission's thinking on Iraq. "The emerging plan by the Iraq Study group," they write, "tries to find a middle road between President Bush's adamant refusal to leave Iraq until the job is done and Democratic demands to pull out U.S. troops." The hope is that such difference-splitting zeal means "leaders in both parties could embrace the plan in the interest of putting aside the polarizing differences of the past three years."
Best of all, "some military experts say the commission's plan to pull out combat units by early 2008 and shift remaining troops into a supporting role may be a logical response to the sectarian violence." Good news!
But wait. Some experts? Say the ISG's proposals may be a logical response to the sectarian violence? What kind of consensus is this that they're reaching?
It's a bit hard to say. But reading between the lines a bit things seem clear. The goal here is not to design an optimal Iraq policy, but to design an Iraq policy that maximizes the chances of political consensus. "The fact that the five Republicans and five Democrats on the congressionally chartered commission all supported the recommendations has sparked hope that the report could bridge the debate over the war." Not hope that the recommendations could advance America's interests in the Middle East or resolve the situation in the region in the best possible way. No. That it could bridge the debate over the war.
Bridging the debate over the war would, of course, be an excellent thing to achieve if it was done in a way that fixed American foreign policy. But fixing the policy problem -- not bridging the debate -- should be the focus. After all, debates have been bridged before. One recalls the heady days of late 2002 when neocons were gung-ho to pull the trigger on invasion but moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans alike had their doubts. So Bush, at the behest of Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and other moderate sorts went to the United Nations. Then came a resolution, the entrance of inspectors, Powell's famous slide show, and only then the war itself, strongly backed by the bulk of the American media and by congressional leaders from both parties. The debate over the war, in short, was successfully bridged.
Suffice it to say, things didn't work out very well.
And here, I think, is the essential appeal of political bridge-building as a goal. Political divides were bridged in the past, and the result was a fiasco. Iraq's current presence in the thick of the political hurly-burly threatens to suss this out into the open. High-profile political debate on Iraq is bad for Republicans, who supported the administration's war policy in lockstep until it was much too late. Democrats, as a whole, should benefit from an absence of political bridges. But pressing the political advantage on Iraq will, naturally, shift the balance of power inside the party away from Bush's hawkish collaborators in favor of war opponents better positioned for political confrontation. Bipartisan adoption of the ISG's recommendations, in other words, may not solve America's Iraq problem, but it just might solve the Iraq problem facing the bipartisan American national security elite that got the country into this mess.
Cliff May, neocon propagandist and ISG expert working group member has described the commission as dominated by people who "had opposed the war from the start and, in my view, mostly wanted to send Bush this message: 'Idiot! We told you so!'"
If only it were true. By my read of the working group's personnel roster it is the case that the May-style neoconservative intellectuals who largely formulated the Bush Iraq policy and took the lead role in pushing for its implementation have been sidelined. Also scantily represented on the commission, however, is another important category of people -- those who saw the direction things were heading and took a strong stand against the march to war. I don't want to say that none of the experts here were against the war, which is almost certainly false. But while many of them wrote in support of invasion or worked for institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that backed it, virtually none of them -- none at all that I recognize -- engaged in public opposition to the war before it happened.
This, however, is just the very mix of silence, collaboration, and complicity on the part of "respectable," "credible," "mainstream" analysts that produced the war in the first place. The more courageous and farsighted voices who got things right were treated as marginal at the time and, shockingly, are still treated as marginal -- excluded from all the coolest bipartisan commissions.
Under the circumstances, it's no wonder that they'd like to take Iraq off the table as a political football. But what's good for an insular elite, shockingly enough, does not serve the best interests of the Democratic Party, or progressive politics, or, indeed, the nation. Debate and controversy will lead to accountability -- badly needed accountability -- for people on both sides of the aisle.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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