Posted on 04/23/2008 7:36:47 PM PDT by Libloather
ISG moves from consensus to conflict
By DANIEL LIBIT
4/22/08 4:32 AM EST
In December 2006, in an effort to build a national consensus on a new way forward in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group painted itself as a portrait of bipartisan chumminess, with all political hackery checked at the door.
Sixteen months later, seven of the 10 ISG members are backing presidential candidates with radically different views about how to proceed in Iraq.
Republicans James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Ed Meese are supporting Sen. John McCain, who argues that the United States should be sending more troops to Iraq. Democrats Vernon Jordan, Leon Panetta and William Perry have endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has vowed to start bringing U.S. troops home immediately. Earlier this month, Democrat Lee Hamilton endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, who vows to start bringing the troops home and to engage in aggressive personal diplomacy with Iran.
Consensus?
Panetta, who served as President Bill Clintons White House chief of staff, says Hillary Clinton and Obama are closely aligned with the Study Groups recommendations. The only one who is not, obviously, is John McCain, he says.
Meese cries hogwash. McCains Iraq views are by far the closest to the ISGs, says the former attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. I think the principal, the primary, part of the report was we should go on to support the effort in Iraq and we should not cut and run or surrender, he says. John is the only one of those three that has taken that position.
Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman from Indiana and co-chairman of both the ISG and the 9/11 Commission, says that while no candidate precisely mirrors my point of view or precisely mirrors views of any members of ISG, Obamas Iraq views are by and large consistent with the ISGs major recommendations.
Meese, again: How can Obama be close if he wants to surrender and cut and run? I dont think that Obama agrees with almost anything in the Iraq Study Group, from what Ive seen in his pronouncements.
Maybe its not surprising that a pack of political animals five Democrats, five Republicans would return to their regularly scheduled partisan programming two years after reaching a bipartisan, unanimous view on Iraq.
We all went back to our chambers, says ISG member Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming who hasnt endorsed a presidential candidate because hes currently on another nonpartisan commission. Do we then go back and think, Now that we did that wonderful thing, we dont want to get back into partisan politics? That was the first thing you would want to do.
But its also what Hamilton and ISG co-chairman Baker, the former secretary of state, warned everyone else against doing at the time. If our report is going to mean anything, ... we really have to take it out of politics, Baker told PBS the week before the report was released.
Moreover, in returning to the partisan fray, ISG members may be guilty of doing exactly what they said shouldnt be done: cherry-picking some of their reports recommendations and bending others to fit the political angles of the candidate they now support.
Take the question of Iran. In its report, the Study Group recommended that the United States help create an Iraq International Support Group and then use it to engage both Iran and Syria in ... diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions.
Daniel Serwer, a vice president at the United States Institute of Peace and executive director of the ISG, says the idea of holding conversations with regional neighbors was an important part of the report, and one that has been implemented in piecemeal and not in the spirit of fullness [in] which it had been recommended. Panetta agrees, calling the recommendation to engage in dialogue with Iraqs neighbors one of the three main objectives of the Iraq Study Group.
McCain rejected that recommendation, telling Baker and Hamilton at an Armed Services Committee hearing in December 2006 that he didnt see much short-term gain in holding a peace conference with people who are dedicated to your extinction.
Meese and Eagleburger, who was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, are supporting him anyway.
Meese dismissed the diplomacy-with-Iran recommendation as probably one of the less important compared to the basic security recommendations.
Eagleburger says times have changed. When the ISG was writing its report, Eagleburger who endorsed McCain last year says he thought the United States would be leaving Iraq less than successfully. I thought we should do anything we could do to loosen things up with the Iranians, or leave them in no doubt, though it would be largely a charade. So, yeah, Im not wild about talking with them now, but to me, its not a major issue if we talk to them.
But instead of beginning to withdraw from Iraq, as many were urging, the president with McCains support sent more troops there. I think I made a mistake on the Iraq Study Group, Eagleburger says.
I didnt expect that there would be the surge. With the surge taking place and administration having shifted its strategic proportions, I would not be in favor of recommendations [we made] at the time. I have changed my mind, and it is because the surge has taken place.
Panetta sees things differently. He says he is not aware of any circumstances that have rendered any of the reports recommendations obsolete. When we had five Democrats and five Republicans come to a unanimous recommendation in the Iraq Study Group, ... the basis of making those recommendations was what we all learned was going on in Iraq, he says. And I frankly dont see that having changed very much.
Serwer agrees, saying he sees very little reason to run away from the ISGs recommendations.
Among the members, only three have refrained from offering public support to a 2008 presidential candidate. Like Simpson, former Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb is serving on another nonpartisan commission and feels duty-bound not to endorse a presidential candidate this year. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor also has refrained from endorsing a candidate.
While Baker has endorsed McCain, he has tellingly avoided commenting publicly on the Arizona senators war stance, focusing more on the candidates character than on his policies. Through a spokesman at his Houston law office, Baker declined to speak for this story.
Bakers co-chairman, Hamilton, says that when it comes to interpreting and applying the report in the context of the 2008 presidential race, every member of the Iraq Study Group has to speak for themselves.
I hold firm to the principal recommendations, Hamilton says, adding that he doesnt feel constrained by the consensus reached two years ago. It doesnt give me any heartburn, he says.
Says Eagleburger: What that means is hes walked away from the report, too. We all have.
Yet another reason to beat these goofballs at the ballot box.
The idea of working with liberals is nonsense. The only way a rational man can do so is with a bat in one hand and a pistol in the other.
This ISG was a joke before the election when McCain was selling his soul to look like a “Maverick” and taking part with this joke of a committee.
It is still a joke.
* Raymond Close, listed on the Iraq Study Groups Web site as a freelance analyst, is actually a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which, in July 2003, called for Vice President Dick Cheneys resignation for an alleged conspiracy to distort intelligence, which they said had been uncovered by none other than Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The following summer, Close posited that Bush and the neocons had fabricated the charge that the evil Iranian mullahs inspired and instigated the radical Shia Islamist insurgency. To Close, the problem was not Iranian training and supply of money and sophisticated explosives to terrorists, but rather neoconservatism.-— source? via
42 posted on 03/17/2007 1:13:36 PM PDT by kcvl
DECEMBER 2006 early : (ISG CO-CHAIRMEN JAMES BAKER & LEE HAMILTON POSE FOR MEN’S VOGUE MAGAZINE — see NUMBNUTS) “In the frenzied final week of the Iraq Study Group’s deliberations, co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton took time out to pose for a photo spread for a fashion magazine, Men’s Vogue. This might seem a dubious decision given the gravity of the moment and their self-appointed roles as the nation’s saviors. The “wise men” who counseled Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam and the members of the Kissinger Commission who tried to reshape Ronald Reagan’s Central American policies did not sit for Annie Leibovitz in the middle of their endeavors. Nor did they hire a mega-public relations firm to sell their recommendations (supposedly intended for the president) to the public at large, as Baker and Hamilton have done.” -——— Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=25802
Vernon Jordan got caught trying to land Monica Lewinsky a plum gig at Revlon to keep her mouth shut; Chuck Robb had a sex scandal with former Miss Virginia Tai Collins and hung out at cocaine parties and listened in on illegally-recorded cell phone chats of a political rival. Neither Jordan nor Robb got indicted. As a result, both were put on the Iraq Study Group. Which probably makes this august body the most ethical and moral study group in history... -—— “Group seen cutting trees to make excellent bird cage lining,” by FR’s JohnHuang2
...and the ISG report was written by Ben Rhodes of Benghazi video fame.
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