The US President is relying on his father's key ally to find a way out of the Iraq war
THE Bush family’s faithful fixer is, with little fanfare, slipping back into the key role of finding a “way forward” — if not a way out — for America in Iraq. When James Baker last month became co-chairman of a congressional task force known as the Iraq Study Group, the news was buried beneath an avalanche of headlines about the invasion’s third anniversary and the deepening troubles of the Administration. But slowly Washington is waking up to just how significant the re-emergence of this 75-year-old statesman may be. Although Mr Baker’s appointment is understood to have been made with the blessing of the White House, he will forever be associated more with the first President Bush than the second.
As such, he is not only representative of a different era of foreign policy, but he is also a target of the neoconservatives, who held sway in Washington until recently. For them he embodies the cautious pragmatism of the 41st President, not the bold approach of the 43rd. Well-placed sources told The Times that Mr Bush had lately been consulting his father more often. This has coincided with a return to a multilateral approach to foreign policy. Mr Baker was Secretary of State at the time of the Gulf War, when he argued forcefully that it would be “ridiculous from a practical standpoint” for US troops to march on to Baghdad and oust Saddam Hussein.
Such a course would “play into the hands of the mullahs of Iran” and lead to civil war, the loss of international support for the US and the fragmentation of Iraq, he said. He has told friends that he now feels vindicated. Although Mr Baker has avoided direct criticism of the President he did, just before the invasion, say: “This is a war of choice, more so, perhaps, than a war of necessity.”
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The Iraq Study Group is intended as a bipartisan attempt to inject some realism into the bitter political debate on Iraq. Mr Baker’s co-chairman is Lee Hamilton, a former Democrat congressman, who says that the group is not seeking to revisit past arguments about the case for war. “We will leave that to historians,” he has said. Other members include Rudolph Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, Robert Gates, a former CIA director, and two key members of Bill Clinton’s Administration, Leon Panetta and William Perry.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2150305,00.html
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