Presidential ingratitude
PRESIDENT BUSH let the ball roll under his glove Thursday when he hinted that he has little enthusiasm for the recommendations of the commission co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and the former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton. Whatever might be questioned in any particular recommendation of the report, the bipartisan spirit and consensus-building purpose of the Iraq Study Group deserve grateful praise from the president, not a defensive rejection.
Had he shown proper appreciation for the work of the panel's 10 senior members and their aides, Bush could have made his own task easier as a commander in chief trying to cope with the disastrous consequences of his own war of choice. Had he enlisted in the Iraq Study Group's common-sense project of seeking to limit the damage from his administration's blunders in Iraq, Bush might be part of the solution -- rather than the continuing cause -- of a daunting problem.
The members of the Iraq Study Group may not have come up with all the right answers; in their pursuit of unanimity, they may have settled for split-the-difference compromises where only one straight path makes sense. But in their bipartisan spirit of cooperation, they gave Americans a much-needed reminder of how statecraft once was conducted -- and how it ought to be conducted once again.
So even though the report itself warns that there is no guarantee of success for its proposals for regional diplomacy, for example, or its imposition of milestones and deadlines on the Iraqi government, or its plan for redeploying and withdrawing US military forces, the nation clearly needed a lucid analysis of realistic options for halting the loss of American blood, treasure, and goodwill in Iraq.
If Bush sensed an implicit rebuke to his own statecraft in the Baker-Hamilton call for a return to the traditional practice of negotiating with adversaries, he was right. This matter should not be reduced to some displaced Oedipal struggle Bush may be waging with his father or his father's old advisers. Whatever the psychological sources, they pale in importance beside the world-changing fact that Bush, by refusing to negotiate with regimes he defines as evil, has broken radically with all his predecessors. The results include avoidable nuclear proliferation in Asia and the looming specter of all-out sectarian warfare in Iraq leading to a regional conflagration.
With its revival of the tradition of seeking consensus on foreign policy, the Baker-Hamilton report offers Bush a chance he should not miss -- a chance to become a uniter of the country, not a denier of reality.
