Iraq Study Group: Baker & Cheney

Here's an interesting picture of your two great mentors, Dick Cheney and James A. Baker III in today's New York Times, Bush. A nice ambiguity. You could read it either way: the image of a two-headed monster, or of two men headed in opposite directions, with Baker the more prominently placed. No way to determine which it is, though, at least until the Iraq Study Group comes out with its report and recommendations. Both of these men, though, are grim-faced, wouldn't you say? Not surprising, given the mess you've passed on to this committee of elders to clean up.

Anyway, the Times reports that the group has been having discussions with Syrian officials about how Syria might be induced to help with the situation in Iraq. It must be a bit galling for you, Bush, having kept a studied and morally superior distance from Syria in the course of your administration, as you have done with that other "sponsor of terrorism", Iran. You and your Condi have been frostily stand-offish when it comes to the "axis of evil" and their friends. We see the results of this vain, ideological policy: more bitter emnity, more chaos in the Middle East, the building of nuclear weapons by Iran, the war in Lebanon, the growth in support for those terrorists who cause us so much grief... The opposite, really, of what you had presumably intended.

Let's hope that Baker and his chums can talk some sense into you, Bush. It seems, for the moment, that even the majority of the American electorate has failed to do so, since I still hear you blathering absurdly about "victory" in Iraq. The lesson you claimed yesterday to have learned from the Vietnam debacle was that it takes time to achieve success when you get yourself into a bloody quagmire. When you say such things, what I hear is still "Stay the course." Wrong lesson. The lesson from Vietnam was surely that we had no standing there in the first place: it was a civil war, we got ourselves caught in a bind between two implacable foes. The lesson was surely that the deeper the hole you dig, the harder it is to climb back out of it.

My fear, as I was saying only yesterday, is that Baker's group will be more concerned with saving your pretty face than with coming up with a real and lasting resolution. Let's hope they have the guts to do the latter.