As elections loom, Bush changes his tune
FOR A WHILE, the joke was on us. The administration and its minions of advisors had a plan for Iraq. The thing was, they wouldn't tell us what it was before the elections.
For a moment, the tea leaves describing the next epoch in the Bush administration's foreign policy seemed like they could be read on "The Daily Show." Earlier this month, host Jon Stewart chatted with James Baker about his new memoir. Baker, the former secretary of state to the first President Bush, co-chairs a bipartisan commission intended to help the current president chart a course out of the catastrophe in Iraq. On TV, Baker offered an aw-shucks, mock-naive, never-occurred-to-me-you'd-want-an-answer-right-now peek at the direction of the panel's recommendations.
Asked what he thought of staying the course, Baker coyly replied, "Depends on what the end result is, of staying the course." Asked about the prospect of partitioning Iraq, Baker allowed only that "we can't rule anything out." He went on to say that "we are not going to present our recommendations until after the elections."
But even though Baker offered few details, his presence said a lot about changes in the Bush administration's foreign-policy thinking as midterm elections loom.
As the Baker roll out began, polls showed that widespread American public unease with the Iraq war is jeopardizing Republican majorities in the House and possibly the Senate.
Baker's public appearances, whether by design or coincidence, offered a clever, disownable way for the Bush administration to signal that it had a plan for Iraq -- one that it would reveal only after the elections, and one that didn't require the White House to give up its campaign theme: while things might not be going well in Iraq, the problem lies with the cowardly Democrats who were for cutting and running. Even though details were withheld, Baker projected the kind of reassuringly pragmatic, center-of-the-road, experienced stewardship that he had brought to earlier diplomatic endeavors, including cobbling together an international coalition in advance of the 1991 Gulf War .
His media appearances hinted to Republican moderates, realists, and independents that the administration had a responsible plan for Iraq, one that was being worked on in the background by a bipartisan team of experienced foreign-policy hands .
What Baker perhaps unwittingly projected was that the Bush administration was no longer so alarmingly in the grip of self-delusion, with its endless out-of-touch pronouncements that the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes, that the resistance that US-led forces were facing in Iraq consisted of only a few hundred foreign jihadists and Baathist dead-enders, that Iraq was not in a civil war. Chief among the seemingly self-deluded, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense.
But what started perhaps as a campaign gimmick has turned into foreign-policy reality: the Bush White House has lost confidence in its ability to win the Iraq war. A campaign to manage public perception of the White House's handling of the Iraq quagmire in advance of the November polls has led to the administration recognizing the need for a genuine policy shift, even as it sounds increasingly uncertain about what it should do.
"My attitude is: Don't do what you're doing if it's not working -- change," Bush told a news conference earlier this month. Sounding suddenly shaky.
And here was Bush speaking to ABC's George Stephanopoulos last week: "Listen, we've never been stay the course, George," he told Stephanopoulos. "We have been -- we will complete the mission, we will do our job and help achieve the goal, but we're constantly adjusting the tactics. Constantly."
According to the Los Angeles Times, among the options that Baker's panel is likely to recommend is something that would be almost a genetic reversal of the Bush administration's whole foreign-policy philosophy up until now: talking to Iran and Syria about becoming partners in stabilizing Iraq. This is a far cry from rhetoric about the "axis of evil."
Another option, called Redeploy and Contain, calls for a phased withdrawal of US troops to bases outside Iraq.
Foreign policy is an outgrowth of domestic politics. This administration is governed by the shrewdest, most sophisticated political operatives in history. And what's happening right now is stunning: Amid a difficult midterm election environment, the Bush team's central foreign-policy convictions are being transformed by domestic political realities -- right before our very eyes.
Laura Rozen is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and the author of the blog War and Piece. 
