{"id":9575,"date":"2007-01-10T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-10T18:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9575.html"},"modified":"2007-01-10T13:00:12","modified_gmt":"2007-01-10T18:00:12","slug":"white-house-concerned-about-how-to-look-distinctive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/white-house-concerned-about-how-to-look-distinctive\/","title":{"rendered":"White House concerned about &#8216;how to look distinctive&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I realize that the Bush White House looked at the Iraq Study Group with some disdain. So-called &#8220;elder statesman,&#8221; mostly friends of Bush&#8217;s dad, weren&#8217;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 &#8220;change everything&#8221; went from front-of-the-bookstore to remainder-table-discount in a matter of days.<\/p>\n<p>But far more troubling is the notion that the Bush administration has shaped its escalation plan in part <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/01\/09\/AR2007010901872.html\">to <i>spite<\/i> the ISG<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 &#8220;way forward&#8221; in Iraq. <strong>How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>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 <strong>because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton<\/strong>. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I had to read that a couple of times to make sure I wasn&#8217;t seeing things. The Bush gang decided to change course in Iraq, but went out of their way to &#8220;look distinctive&#8221; from the Iraq Study Group? Troop escalation wasn&#8217;t in the ISG report, so the Bush gang latched onto the idea <i>because<\/i> the ISG didn&#8217;t endorse it? As if this all some kind of exercise in Oedipal spite?<\/p>\n<p>Exactly what kind of men-children are we dealing with here?<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nLegal Fiction&#8217;s publius, who also seemed disturbed by this, had a <a href=\"http:\/\/lawandpolitics.blogspot.com\/2007_01_01_archive.html#9161316862063028249\">good piece<\/a> on the subject.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[I]f the NSC official is correct, Bush is picking this option <i>out of vanity and spite<\/i> simply because the Baker Group didn&#8217;t offer it.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, it sounds like a promising strategy. After all, if history has taught us nothing else, it&#8217;s that military strategies with no empirical basis adopted out of pride and vanity are usually phenomenally successful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Be afraid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I realize that the Bush White House looked at the Iraq Study Group with some disdain. So-called &#8220;elder statesman,&#8221; mostly friends of Bush&#8217;s dad, weren&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}