Baker To Bush: Game Over (Dreyfuss calls ISG a "death blow" to Cheneyism)

BurtWorm

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Thu Nov-30-06 03:16 PM
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Baker To Bush: Game Over (Dreyfuss calls ISG a "death blow" to Cheneyism)

Too optimistic? I hope not!

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/30/baker_to_bush_game_over.php

Robert Dreyfuss
November 30, 2006

Robert Dreyfuss is an Alexandria, Va.-based writer specializing in politics and national security issues. He is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005), a contributing editor at The Nation, and a writer for Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Rolling Stone. He can be reached through his website, www.robertdreyfuss.com.

Today’s report that the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker, will call for a pullback of American combat forces in Iraq is the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq. Stripped of its diplomatic weasel words, the ISG’s recommendations are a stunning blow to the administration of George W. Bush and everything it stands for. “We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out,” said one of the ISG’s commission members, according to The New York Times.

Faced with the ISG consensus, backed by a determined Democratic majority in Congress that was catapulted into power by an American electorate sick of the war, President Bush will have no choice but to capitulate. Early in 2007, American troops will start to come home. War-weary, mainstream Republicans, eager to get Iraq off the table before the 2008 elections, will strongly support the ISG’s exit strategy. It marks a sweeping, irreversible change of course for American foreign policy, and a death blow to Vice President Dick Cheney and the remaining, but dwindling population of neoconservatives inside the administration.

Adding insult to injury, the policy will be carried out by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, a former member of the ISG, who will purge the Pentagon of neocons, Rumsfeld loyalists, and assorted other extremists.

The ISG’s decision, which will be officially announced on December 6, represents a formal recognition by the American foreign policy establishment that Bush’s criminally misguided war of aggression in Iraq is lost. A war that was meant to demonstrate to the world the shock and awe of American power is ending as proof positive that the United States is too weak to subdue a fragmented nation of 25 million. A war that was meant to secure a preeminent place for the United States in the oil-rich Persian Gulf is ending with America in full retreat, leaving a shattered Iraq, a resurgent Iran, and a Saudi Arabia that is angry, bitter and disgusted with American bungling. A war that was meant to enhance Israel’s regional might is ending with what is likely, now, to be a reinvigorated push for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian issue that will come at Israel’s expense—in Syria, in Lebanon, and in the Occupied Territories.