Part of me got my hopes up, just a little, a couple of weeks ago about the Iraq Study Group. I thought that maybe, just maybe, the White House was looking for a face-saving way to get out of Iraq, and that James Baker was going to come riding in to rescue him. “It’s not my fault,” the president would say, “Dad’s friend told me to cut and run.”
Alas, no such luck.
A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military withdrawal, according to officials who have seen all or parts of the document.
Not only will the ISG fall short of recommending some kind of withdrawal, the ISG will fall short of recommending much of anything. “It’s not at all clear that we can reach consensus on the military questions,” a commission member told the NYT.
Some on the commission will want the administration to talk to Middle Eastern countries, including Iran and Syria. The White House doesn’t want to do that. Others on the commission will talk about redeployment. The White House doesn’t want that, either. Still others will want tens of thousands of additional troops deployed. The Bush gang isn’t exactly open to that option, either.
So, as Kevin Drum put it, “the Kaubuki dance continues.”
The Center for American Progress calls it “Stay the Course, 2.0.”
The blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group (ISG) headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton will meet today in Washington to discuss the first draft of its review of Iraq policy. According to the New York Times, the current draft does not include a proposal for the phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. It is the latest sign that U.S. policy in Iraq is unlikely to undergo a significant shift despite the midterm election results, which were viewed as a decisive national rebuke of the Iraq war. NBC News correspondent Norah O’Donnell noted yesterday that the Pentagon is "already developing an alternative" review of Iraq policy "to give the President an out if he doesn’t like the recommendations" of the ISG.
According to media reports, that review is likely to recommend a "stay-the-course-plus" strategy, combining a temporary increase of 20,000-30,000 troops with a long-term effort to train and advise Iraqi forces. Also, the White House this weekend repeated its "insistence that Iraq was not in a civil war," days after one of the worst spasms of sectarian violence since the war began, intensifying the bloodshed that scholars say "already puts Iraq in the top ranks of the civil wars of the last half-century." Just before the recent elections, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that the White House would go "full speed ahead" with its current Iraq policy regardless of the election results. "We’ve got the basic strategy right," Cheney said. He was not bluffing.
Did I mention that the war in Iraq has now lasted longer than World War II?