I realize that the Bush White House looked at the Iraq Study Group with some disdain. So-called “elder statesman,” mostly friends of Bush’s dad, weren’t going to come in and tell the president how to wage his war, no siree. Within a few minutes of Bush thanking ISG members for their work, Bush made the panel instantly irrelevant. The report that was going to “change everything” went from front-of-the-bookstore to remainder-table-discount in a matter of days.
But far more troubling is the notion that the Bush administration has shaped its escalation plan in part to spite the ISG.
Although the president was publicly polite, few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new “way forward” in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme.
As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton. (emphasis added)
I had to read that a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The Bush gang decided to change course in Iraq, but went out of their way to “look distinctive” from the Iraq Study Group? Troop escalation wasn’t in the ISG report, so the Bush gang latched onto the idea because the ISG didn’t endorse it? As if this all some kind of exercise in Oedipal spite?
Exactly what kind of men-children are we dealing with here?
Legal Fiction’s publius, who also seemed disturbed by this, had a good piece on the subject.
[I]f the NSC official is correct, Bush is picking this option out of vanity and spite simply because the Baker Group didn’t offer it.
All in all, it sounds like a promising strategy. After all, if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that military strategies with no empirical basis adopted out of pride and vanity are usually phenomenally successful.
Be afraid.