Tony Blair will like the Baker report. It is shallow and dishonest. It shows how to weasel a way out of trouble and leave former friends to fall, undefended, by the wayside. It suggests how blame may be shifted onto hapless Iraqi ministers, and fatuous “milestones” and “timetables” confected with a view to their being demonstrably missed. It explains how international conferences may be set up in order that they should fail. For Britain and the United States, Baker is now, with no shadow of doubt, the only way out. So is “Forward with James Baker III!” to be my banner?
Well it should be. But something rises in my gorge at the moral and intellectual shabbiness of the exercise. If we have lost this war, and with it the likely capacity to forestall the vacuum that our defeat will surely leave behind, shouldn’t we just say so?
If you seek the weakest link in an argument — the premise in which its authors feel least confidence — look for the proposition they assert most often. Like a tongue to a sore tooth, a protagonist returns compulsively to what he has not convincingly established.
Six times in the slim Iraq Study Group report presented to the US President this week by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the assertion that Iraq’s neighbours cannot desire chaos to continue is repeated. “No country in the region will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq,” say the authors, repeatedly, in many different ways. The Baker group just cannot leave this supposition alone. They know it is hollow.
If however you seek the strongest link in an argument — the proposition its authors know to be the brutal truth — look for what they touch on most lightly: the whisper, the oh-by-the-way remark.
Only once do Baker and Hamilton engage with the cruellest question. They answer it quickly, flatly — and move on. “If,” they say, “the Iraqi Government does not make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones on national reconciliation, security, and governance, the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi Government.”
Well that’s it, then — isn’t it? Never mind the other 78 recommendations: that’s all we need to know. Given that it is not the case that Iraq’s neighbours want to quit troublemaking, and given that, unless they do, a feeble government in Baghdad will be unable to reassert control, the ISG report is really about a timetable for American withdrawal. The withdrawal is finally unconditional. Baker says so.
All the rest is aspiration. You can almost hear the Beach Boys’ chorus Wouldn’t it be nice . . . ? as you read.
Wouldn’t it be nice . . . if Iran sat down in a regional conference and agreed to help re-create a strong, stable Iraqi nationalism? But as Iran has nightmare memories of such a force, no wish to assume control of a maelstrom of militias itself, and no conceivable interest in extricating George W. Bush from his difficulties, what’s in it for Iran?
Wouldn’t it be nice . . . if Syria joined talks and sealed its border against arms and insurgents? But as Damascus would be incapable of propping up a Sunni government in Iraq and unwilling to see a Shia one, what’s in it for Syria? Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has more to fear from order in Iraq (overseen by Tehran) than from chaos. For each of these neighbours mayhem is of course regrettable; but for all of them it is second best; and nobody agrees what’ s best.
Wouldn’t it be nice . . . if Nouri al-Maliki’s tottering administration in Baghdad could rub an Aladdin’s lamp, turn wish to reality and gain a grip on the desperate security situation whose horrors Baker so unsparingly catalogues? But how? Baker’s only suggestion seems to be that US forces should withdraw from a combat role supporting the Iraqi Government and concentrate on helping to “train” local security forces. Isn’t that what the Americans and Mr al-Maliki have been wanting to achieve all along? US forces have not gone into battle on some kind of a whim, but to shore up a puppet government against collapse. If Baker is content for it to collapse, let him say so.
Notice, not only in James Baker’s but also in Tony Blair’s and George W. Bush’s remarks, a newly reproachful tenor in bewailing the Iraqi administration’s “failure to take control” of militias or “root out corruption” in the police. As though it could. As though the thought simply hadn’t occurred in Baghdad that this might be a good idea. As though that al-Maliki fellow just needs boxing about the ears to get up off his backside, reconcile his warring countrymen, find out who those shockingly corrupt policemen are and sack them — and then sort out the security situation. Goodness me — we never thought of that!
I do find this odious. Those in the Government in Baghdad are at their wits’ end and sinking: powerless to defeat what they hardly need Baker to tell them are the causes of the disaster unwinding on their doorsteps. They and their problems are the creation of British and American policy and if Mr al-Maliki’s Government cannot achieve what Britain and America want in Iraq, it ill-behoves us to establish (in Baker’s phrase) “milestones” for him to reach, to rail at him when he fails to reach them, and then to walk out in disgust at the lack of progress — as though only the Iraqi administration’s foolish shortcomings had cheated the Forces of Freedom of victory. If Mr Blair is hoping to muse in his autobiography that a potentially winning strategy in Iraq was unfortunately let down by the Iraqis themselves, then he is even more deluded than we imagine.
Mr Baker knows very well that Mr al-Maliki must fail. Prepare for the spectacle of Uncle Sam the organ-grinder storming from the stage in a huff, shouting abuse at his monkey. Reach for the sick bags as the puppeteer starts throwing punches at his puppet. Weep, as the ventriloquist indicts his dummy.
Forgive me, fellow peaceniks. I do realise we ought to be commending this ISG report. It will take our governments where we know they have to go. It will offer a ladder for Mr Blair and Mr Bush to climb down and, heaven knows, a climbdown is what has to happen next. We should be playing along with the elderly diplomatist’s game, grunting admiringly about Mr Baker’s “realism”, and fuming at the White House’s resistance to his conclusions.
We should be aiming kicks at neocon shins by quoting from a report that (sneers The New York Times) “drips with ‘isn’t-this-obvious?’ ”.
But it isn’t obvious. The plan itself won’t work. As the BBC’s eloquent and curiously underrated Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, put it on the radio this week, “it is the tone” not the detail of Baker’s report that is important and new.
That’s true. The tone says: “We’ve lost.” The tone says: “We should have seen this coming.” The tone says: “All we can do now is play a losing hand.” General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the General Staff, missed the point magnificently this week when he worried aloud that the trouble with a set deadline (of 2008) was that we might have to quit without having achieved our war aims. Poor, upright, soldierly Sir Mike has not realised that that is the whole idea.
But Mr Baker has, and furious neocons realise it too. The term realpolitik has become a cliché in media treatment of the ISG report this week but the irony is this: Baker’s conclusions are anything but realistic: they represent unrealism of the most fanciful kind. His route map is to La-la Land. He knows it. His report is the sugar. The pill is Defeat.
Forgive me but I am finding the sheer cynicism of all this difficult to stomach. Is “we lost” so very hard to say? Now that he has limbered up with a range of moving apologies for things done by dead people who are not him, perhaps, on one of his increasingly fleeting visits to this country, Tony Blair might try his hand at the big one.
Matthew Parris