Shuttle without diplomacy - By Sidney Blumenthal at Salon

[applegrove]

Shuttle without diplomacy
After signaling support for James Baker's Iraq proposals, Condi caved and stood faithfully by the president's failing policies -- assuring her irrelevance, and that of the State Department.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon


Jan. 10, 2007 | "James Baker, the consummate Republican political operator over the past 30 years, did not expect that President Bush would accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group he co-chaired simply on its merits. Baker's hidden political hand was unrevealed in the report's dire analysis or in its urgent suggestions for diplomacy or force redeployment. Baker summoned as witnesses the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military commanders in Iraq past and present (including the recently named commander there, Gen. David Petraeus) and even British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But he understood that enlisting all of these formidable figures was insufficient. Baker privately negotiated with Bush, but he did not rest solely on his own powers of persuasion to convince the president, as the report put it, that the "situation is grave and deteriorating" and his policies are "not working."

Ultimately, Baker's political strategy counted on the decisive intervention of one person in the president's closed inner circle -- who sees him alone and could not be kept from him, and on whom he has become dependent for support and trusts implicitly -- to deliver the bad news that continuing those policies would only deepen the disaster and explain that he had no way out except to change course.

After the debacle of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," her former mentor, Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and still his public voice, published an article on July 30, 2006, in the Washington Post titled "Beyond Lebanon: This Is the Time for a U.S.-Led Comprehensive Settlement." In it he argued that the peace process the Bush administration had abandoned was essential in stabilizing the whole region, not least Iraq, and in reducing the influence of Iran.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/01/10/condi_rice/

[rodeodance]

1. whow. Sidney-----you are right on the button!!