Why the Baker Commission is unlikely to salvage the disaster in Iraq
by Justin Raimondo
"Yet this doesn't exhaust the possibilities of eventually salvaging the situation and rescuing the ruling elite's floundering Iraq project from utter oblivion – the solution, some aver, is to dress up the same interventionist mindset that preceded the invasion in the garb of "fresh thinking." In short, our policy in the region is overdue for a makeover – without changing the underlying fundamentals – and this is the task assigned to the Baker Commission, a motley crew from both parties, led by the venerable James A. Baker III, chief adviser to the president 's father.
In any case, the Commission's real purpose, Dreyfuss suggests, is to salvage the GOP from looming electoral disaster by framing a bipartisan consensus and constraining the Democrats in their critique of the war. Republican leaders, desperate at the prospect of losing big in 2008, are demanding that something be done to shore up their collapsing political base, and Baker – the Bush family's Mr. Fixit – is being called on once again.
Both wings of the War Party, the Democrats as well as the Republicans, are committed to the error of American "hegemonism," and concur that we need to police the world – the only differences being over the depth of the footprint we leave in our wake. All agree that we need an empire of military bases, because it is somehow essential to our "national security" that we have the ability to leapfrog from one "lily pad" to another, so that our alleged "national interests" encircle the globe. Until we abandon this grandiose vision and scale down our ambitions to create a "new world order" – as Bush I once put it – we will continue to fall victim to the same hubris that was our undoing in Iraq."
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