Robert Bryce: Omitting the Obvious with James Baker

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Omitting the Obvious with James Baker

By ROBERT BRYCE
December 6, 2006

After months of hype and speculation, James A. Baker III and the Iraq Study Group are on the verge of releasing their recommendations. And yet after all of that hype, the group won't provide a single deadline for getting American troops out of Iraq nor will the group address the seminal question when it comes to America's future in Iraq, which, obviously is: should we stay, or leave?

That Baker and the rest of his group fail to provide guidance on this essential point shouldn't be surprising. Baker has made a career out of omitting the obvious whenever it suits his political purposes. That's made abundantly clear in his new book, Work Hard, Study and Keep Out of Politics.
In that tome, a 460-page auto-hagiography that recounts his career working for presidents from Ford to Reagan to the First George Bush to the Second George Bush, Baker neglects to mention a single word about his role in one of the defining events of the Reagan/Bush era: the savings and loan debacle.

Baker ­ perhaps more than any other single American ­ bears primary responsibility for the loss of more than $100 billion in taxpayer money during the savings and loan meltdown of the 1980s. Baker served as Reagan's treasury secretary from early 1985 to August 1988, a time period when fraudsters and con artists were looting banks and thrifts all over the country, but particularly in Texas. Throughout his stint at the treasury, and particularly in 1988, Baker worked hard to downplay the magnitude of the growing S&L disaster for obvious reasons: admitting the scope of the mess would make Texas look bad, it would make Reagan look bad, and in doing so, it would hurt Baker's crony, the First George Bush, who was running for president in November 1988.

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Despite those numbers, despite the magnitude of the S&L mess, despite the fact that he was on the job during the worst of the fraud and looting, none of this information appears in Work Hard. In fact, the phrase "savings and loan" doesn't even appear in Baker's book.

Given that omission, given his record of malfeasance during the S&L disaster, is it any surprise that Baker has failed to address the central question in Iraq?