southchild

Writing in slate.com, Christopher Hitchens has this essay, “Look Who’s Cutting and Running Now” in which he argues that “James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq.”

Taken together with the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld, the nomination of Robert Gates, and the holy awe with which the findings of the Iraq Study Group are now expected, this means that the Bush administration, or large parts of it, is now cutting if not actually running, and it is looking for partners in the process.
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The summa of wisdom in these circles is the need for consultation with Iraq’s immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.

This will present few difficulties to Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon. In order to recruit the Baathist regime of Hafez Assad to his coalition of the cynical against Saddam in the Kuwait war, Baker and Bush senior both acquiesced in the obliteration of Lebanese sovereignty. “I believe in talking to your enemies,” said Baker last month—invoking what is certainly a principle of diplomacy. In this instance, however, it will surely seem to him to be more like talking to old friends—who just happen to be supplying the sinews of war to those who kill American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Is it likely that they will stop doing this once they become convinced that an American withdrawal is only a matter of time?

Hitchens then discusses Baker’s role in the 1991 Gulf War and how those decisions set the stage for the contemporary problems of Iraq. This seems to me a bit of second-guessing (not our favorite endeavor); nonetheless, it’s an interesting analysis of the players then and now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 4:04 pm and is filed under General, islamic fascism, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.