The Iraq Study Group proposals represent the most sensible thinking on the Middle East to emerge from Washington in a very long time, writes Lara Marlowe
The Iraq Study Group report published this week was awaited like the Messiah. With 3,000 Iraqis being killed every month, nearly 3,000 dead US servicemen, after the US has spent $400 billion (€300 billion) and been in Iraq for longer than it participated in the second World War, Washington is so desperate for a way out that many commentators urged Bush to accept the group's recommendations in toto.
But the president prefers to wait for reviews by the Pentagon and National Security Council, and has distanced himself from one of the report's key proposals: direct talks with Iran and Syria. The US has "weeks, not months, and maybe days" to act to stop the downward spiral in Iraq, said Lee Hamilton, the former democratic congressman who co-chaired the study group.
"I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad, saying 'I like this, but I don't like that'," said James Baker, the former secretary of state who headed the group. "It's a comprehensive strategy designed to deal with the problems in Iraq, but also to deal with other problems in the region. These are interdependent recommendations."
As the authors of the report clearly state, there is no guarantee that the bloodbath in Iraq and the threat of a wider regional conflagration can be stopped, even if their 79 recommendations are followed.
When Bush began planning the invasion of Iraq in the summer of 2002, he had dinner with his then secretary of state, Colin Powell.
"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," Powell told Bush, as related in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems . . . It's going to suck the oxygen out of everything."
The Baker-Hamilton report recognises that "the US has special obligations" to Iraq, but its authors want to shed responsibility for the 25 million souls whom Colin Powell rightly predicted the US would inherit from Saddam Hussein. The central strategy of the report - to shift responsibility to the Iraqi government and security forces - has been the stated objective of the Bush administration since the beginning.
But the Iraqis are on a slow learning curve, and the US is growing impatient. To the Americans' consternation, they seem to prefer civil war. "Key Shia and Kurdish leaders have little commitment to national reconciliation," the report notes. "Many of Iraq's most powerful and well-positioned leaders are not working towards a united Iraq." Unlike Bush, who insisted again on Thursday that "victory is important", the report says the US must get out, whether or not the Iraqis can rule themselves. "It should be unambiguous that continued US political, military and economic support for Iraq depends on the Iraqi government's demonstrating political will and making substantial progress."
In overthrowing Saddam, the US destroyed the fragile sectarian balance that perhaps could not be maintained without the cruel lid of dictatorship. A decade of economic sanctions and three weeks of bombing flattened the country's infrastructure, which despite the expenditure of $16 billion in reconstruction funds has not been restored.
It seems immoral for the US to walk away from the civil war and economic disaster that its mad invasion fostered. But polling quoted by the report says 79 per cent of Iraqis have a negative view of US influence in their country, and 61 per cent approve of attacks on US forces. Baker-Hamilton advocates pulling out all but some 20,000 military advisers by early 2008.
A careful, phased withdrawal is probably the least bad option, though US generals have cautioned that the report is over-optimistic about the possibility of creating a cohesive Iraqi army and police force that is able to stand its ground against insurgents, militias and al-Qaeda, mainly because security forces are infiltrated by militias and insurgents.
In February 2006, US generals admitted that after years of efforts by US occupation forces, the number of Iraqi battalions that could fight against the insurgency without US support was zero out of 98. The US has repeatedly gone into battle with Iraqi forces only to see them desert.
Last August, the Iraqi army promised to provide six battalions to help 15,000 US forces in Operation Together Forward II to secure Baghdad; in the end they provided only two. And prime minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded that the US abandon operations against his fellow Shia Muslims in the slums of Sadr city.
As the report notes, "US forces can 'clear' any neighbourhood, but there are neither enough US troops present nor enough support from Iraqi security forces to 'hold' neighbourhoods so cleared. The same holds true for the rest of Iraq . . . US forces seem to be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end."
The promise of a US departure is offered as an incentive to insurgents to join in negotiations on national reconciliation. That, and recommendations that Bush make a public commitment not to seek control of Iraqi oil and not to seek permanent bases in Iraq, amounts to asking the US president to eat humble pie.
Back in 1991, George Bush senior promised a "new world order" for the Middle East. It is a measure of the decline of America's empire and ambitions that the report now pins hopes of salvation on a far more modest "new diplomatic offensive".
The report says that "all key issues in the Middle East - the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, Iran, the need for political and economic reforms, and extremism and terrorism - are inextricably linked". Better late than never, one is tempted to say. But there's a nagging feeling that the lies, hypocrisy and double standards have gone on too long, that even the Baker-Hamilton proposal for an international peace conference along the lines of Madrid in 1991 might lead nowhere.
Israel is allergic to suggestions that its occupation of Arab lands has motivated suicide bombers in Iraq and al-Qaeda recruits throughout the world. Not surprisingly, prime minister Ehud Olmert reacted negatively to the report, saying, "The Middle East has a lot of problems that are not connected to us."
Israelis have bad memories of Baker, the man who told them during the Madrid peace process: "Here's the state department phone number. When you're serious about making peace, call us."
The most revolutionary - and encouraging - recommendation is that negotiations be based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which demand that Israel withdraw from Arab land occupied in the 1967 war, namely the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. The last two Israeli prime ministers abandoned all pretence of offering the Arabs "land for peace" saying they would get only "peace for peace". Israel annexed the Golan Heights and virulently rejects the idea that they might be restored to Damascus in exchange for peace with Syria and Lebanon.
Attention has focused on the report's recommendation that the US talk to Iran and Syria. In the arrogant days before the invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives in the Bush administration made it clear that once they got rid of Saddam, Damascus and Tehran were next in line for "regime change". So it was in the interest of neither for the US occupation to go smoothly.
The US left Syria's long border with Iraq open for the first year after the invasion, during which time thousands of Baathists fled in cars packed with cash to Damascus. Among them is believed to be Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam's vice-presidents. Signs are that Damascus is happy to modulate the flow of money and insurgents back into Iraq, in exchange for US indulgence over the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. If Syrian president Bashar al-Assad believed there was a realistic chance of regaining Golan, there'd be no limit to Syrian co-operation.
Iran is a more difficult proposition. The Islamic Republic is in a position of strength in Iraq, and the Baker-Hamilton report says there have been indications that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not interested in talks with the Great Satan.
But the US would gain credibility if it made such an overture, the report argues. To avoid trammelling up negotiations on Iraq, it proposes (naively?) that the Iranian nuclear file could be kept separate, confined to the purview of the Security Council.
The Baker-Hamilton report is above all a frightening avowal of US failure in Iraq. Its proposals are a long shot, but they offer the first sensible thinking from Washington on the Middle East in a very long time.
When the Bush administration issued a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in the autumn of 2002, all doubts, conditional verbs and dissenting opinions were weeded out of the five-page summary of the 92-page classified report. After the invasion of Iraq, the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks reported in his book Fiasco how White House officials disclosed that neither Bush nor his then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice read the entire estimate.
Let's hope they read the Baker-Hamilton report. Over and over.