How to Stay in Iraq: The Iraq Study Group Rides to the Rescue

[Jcrowley]

How to Stay in Iraq
The Iraq Study Group Rides to the Rescue
By Tom Engelhardt

Finally, the President and the New York Times agree. In a news conference with the Iraqi Prime Minister last week, George W. Bush insisted that there would be no "graceful exit" or withdrawal from Iraq; that this was not "realism." The next day the Times, in a front page piece (as well as "analysis" inside the paper) pointed out that, "despite a Democratic election victory this month that was strongly based on antiwar sentiment, the idea of a major and rapid withdrawal seems to be fading as a viable option."

In fact, in the media, as in the counsels of James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, withdrawal without an adjective or qualifying descriptor never arrived as a "viable option." In fact, withdrawal, aka "cut and run," has never been more than a passing foil, one useful "extreme" guaranteed to make the consensus-to-come more comforting.

On Wednesday, at the end of a gestation period nearly long enough to produce a human baby, the Baker committee -- by now, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright, practically "a parallel policy establishment" -- will hand over to the President its eagerly anticipated "consensus" report, its "compromise" plan that takes the "middle road," that occupies a piece of inside-the-Beltway "middle ground," and that will almost certainly be the policy equivalent of a still birth.

Whatever satisfaction it briefly offers, it might as well be sent directly to the Baghdad morgue. At a length of perhaps 100 pages, evidently calling for an "aggressive" diplomatic engagement with neighboring Iran and Syria -- even unofficial American officials advocating diplomacy just can't seem to avoid some form of "aggression" -- it will also, Washington Post reporters Wright and Thomas Ricks assure us, call for "a major withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq" (no timetables, naturally).

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=145043

[MichiganVote]

1. Yeah sure. An entire Cabinet, Congress and Pentagon at the idiot's disposal

and one tiny little "study" group is going to save the day. What utter bullshit. Well it sure as hell won't be for the sake of the dead, soon to be dead, or those afraid of becoming dead.

[patrice]

2. This is the part where we leave and stay.

Next, we stay and leave.

Pay no attention to the man behind the screen, maintaining permanent bases.

[thethinker]

3. BS

Bush has no intentions of getting out of Iraq. The Iraq Study Group was created to give him cover. It is a stalling tactic. They are trying to get out in front of a congress controlled by Democrats that will be pressuring him to withdrawal the troops.