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October 9th, 2006 - G.O.P.’s Baker
Hints Iraq Plan Needs Change |
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G.O.P.’s Baker Hints Iraq
Plan Needs Change By David E. Sanger New York Times October 9, 2006 Washington, Oct. 8 - James
A. Baker III, the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan panel reassessing
Iraq strategy for President Bush, said Sunday that he expected the panel
would depart from Mr. Bush’s repeated calls to “stay the course,” and he
strongly suggested that the White House enter direct talks with countries it
had so far kept at arm’s length, including Iran and Syria. “I believe in talking to
your enemies,” he said in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,”
noting that he made 15 trips to Damascus, the Syrian capital, while serving
Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state. “It’s got to be hard-nosed,
it’s got to be determined,” Mr. Baker said. “You don’t give away anything,
but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.” Mr. Bush refused to deal
with Iran until this spring, when he said the United States would join
negotiations with Tehran if it suspended enriching nuclear fuel. Iran has so
far refused. Contacts with both Syria and North Korea have also been sharply
limited. But the “Iraq Study Group,”
created by Mr. Baker last March with the encouragement of some members of
Congress to come up with new ideas on Iraq strategy, has already talked to
some representatives of Iran and Syria about Iraq’s future, he said. His comments Sunday offered
the first glimmer of what other members of his study group, in interviews
over the past two weeks, have described as an effort to find a politically
face-saving way for Mr. Bush slowly to extract the United States from the
war. “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that there are
alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in
the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run,’ ” Mr. Baker
said. He explicitly rejected a
rapid withdrawal from Iraq, saying that would invite Iran, Syria and “even
our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum. He also dismissed, as
largely unworkable, a proposal by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the ranking
Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to decentralize Iraq and
give the country’s three major sectarian groups, the Kurds, Shiites and
Sunnis, their own regions, distributing oil revenue to all. Mr. Baker said he
had concluded “there’s no way to draw lines” in Iraq’s major cities, where ethnic
groups are intermingled. According to White House
officials and commission members, Mr. Baker has been talking to President
Bush and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on a regular
basis. Those colleagues say he is unlikely to issue suggestions that the
president has not tacitly approved in advance. “He’s a very loyal
Republican, and you won’t see him go against Bush,” said a colleague of Mr.
Baker, who asked not to be identified because the study group is keeping a
low profile before it formally issues recommendations. “But he feels that the
yearning for some responsible way out which would not damage American
interests is palpable, and the frustration level is exceedingly high.” At 76, Mr. Baker still
enjoys a reputation as one of Washington’s craftiest bureaucratic operators
and as a trusted adviser of the Bush family, which has enlisted his help for
some of its deepest crises, including the second President Bush’s effort to
win the vote recount in Florida after the 2000 presidential election. Mr.
Baker served as White House chief of staff, as well as secretary of state
under the first President Bush. Andrew H. Card Jr.,
President Bush’s former chief of staff, acknowledged recently that he had
twice suggested that Mr. Baker would be a good replacement for Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Bush rejected that advice, and some
associates of Mr. Baker say they do not believe he is interested, at his age,
in taking the job, which could put him in the position of having to carry out
his group’s advice. Those proposals - which he
has said must be both bipartisan and unanimous - could very well give Mr.
Bush some political latitude, should he decide to adopt strategies that he
had once rejected, like setting deadlines for a phased withdrawal of American
forces. Given his extraordinary
loyalty to the Bush family - Mr. Baker was present on Saturday at the formal
christening of a new aircraft carrier named for the first President Bush it was notable on Sunday that Mr. Baker also
joined the growing number of Republicans who are trying to create some space
between themselves and the White House. On Sunday, on “This Week,”
Mr. Baker was shown a video of the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who said last week
that Iraq was “drifting sideways” and urged consideration of a “change of
course” if the Iraqi government could not restore order in two or three
months. The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has offered a
similar warning to the Iraqi government. Asked if he agreed with that
timetable, Mr. Baker said, “Yes, absolutely. And we’re taking a look at other
alternatives.” The Iraq Study Group,
created with the reluctant blessing of the White House, includes notable
Republicans and Democrats, among them William J. Perry, a former defense
secretary under President Clinton; former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New
York; the former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor; and Vernon E.
Jordan Jr., a longtime civil rights leader. Mr. Baker’s Democratic
co-chairman is Lee H. Hamilton, the former Congressman who once served as the
chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was co-chairman of the
9/11 commission. In interviews, members of
the study group have privately expressed concern that within months, whatever
course the group recommended could be overtaken by the chaos in Iraq. “I
think the big question is whether we can come up with something before it’s
too late,” one member said late last month, after the group had met in
Washington to assess its conclusions after a trip to Baghdad. “There’s a real
sense that the clock is ticking, that Bush is desperate for a change, but no
one in the White House can bring themselves to say so with this election
coming.” Like other members, he
declined to speak on the record, saying public comments should come only from
Mr. Baker or Mr. Hamilton. Several members said they
were struck during their visit to Baghdad by how many Americans based there —
political and intelligence officers as well as members of the military - said
they feared that the United States was stuck between two bad alternatives:
pulling back and watching sectarian violence soar, or remaining a crucial
part of the new effort to secure Baghdad, at the cost of much higher American
casualties. It was a measure of how much
the situation had deteriorated that only one member of the group, former
Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia, ventured beyond the protected walls of
the Green Zone, the American and government center of Baghdad. The study
group is just now finishing its interviews, and Mr. Baker has not yet begun
to draft the report, members said. Some who have already met
with the group, like Mr. Biden, who may seek the Democratic nomination for
president, have emerged saying they think their ideas are being heard. On
Friday, Mr. Biden said he thought he saw “heads nodding up and down” about
his ideas on creating autonomous regions of the country, but Mr. Baker made
clear on Sunday that he was not among them. “Experts on Iraq have
suggested that, if we do that, that in itself will trigger a huge civil war
because the major cities in Iraq are mixed,” Mr. Baker said. Mr. Baker has been critical
of how the Bush administration conducted post-invasion operations, and he has
not backed away from statements he made in his 1995 memoir, in which he
described opposing the ouster of Saddam Hussein after the Persian Gulf war in
1991. In the book, he said he feared that such action might lead to a civil
war, “even if Saddam were captured and his regime toppled, American forces
would still be confronted with the specter of a military occupation of
indefinite duration to pacify the country and sustain a new government.” On Sunday, the interviewer,
George Stephanopoulos, said, “It’s exactly what’s happened now, isn’t it?”
Mr. Baker replied, “A lot of it.” Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/world/middleeast/09baker.html |