Politics > Politics-USA > Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report - Whine and Attack Jim Baker as enemy of Israel
| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"can_o_worms" |
| Date: |
06 Dec 2006 08:15:01 AM |
| Object: |
Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report - Whine and Attack Jim Baker as enemy of Israel |
POLITICS-US:
Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35731
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the
neo-conservative press here over the past month, one
would think that former Secretary of State James Baker
poses the biggest threat to the United States and
Israel since Saddam Hussein.
As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once
had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid
guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991
Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by
neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as
close to the devil himself.
But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence
grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose
long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best
extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives
did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday,
has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the
kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious"
French.
The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been
waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the
on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard
and The National Review -- has been to discredit the
ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are
published.
Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague
accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times
and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual
reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of
a much bigger effort at training and strengthening
Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass
appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants
have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there
from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008.
On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen.
John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many
as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They
have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of
Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region,
leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's
anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage
Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as
part of its diplomatic strategy.
Baker himself telegraphed this aspect of his approach
after meeting with Damascus's foreign minister and
Tehran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif, who
reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "(I)n my view, it's not
appeasement to talk to your enemies," he said.
Those remarks set off a tidal wave of protest and
criticism beginning with the published announcement
in the Weekly Standard by Michael Rubin, a fellow at
the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), that he had resigned from an "expert working
group" advising the ISG. Rubin accused Baker and his
Democratic co-chair, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, of
having "gerrymandered (the) advisory panels to ratify
predetermined recommendations" -- panels, he noted,
which included Middle East experts who had actually
opposed the Iraq war.
In a preview of attacks that appeared with increasing
frequency over the following month, Rubin also assailed
Baker for what he called the former secretary of
state's "legacy" in the Middle East -- namely, his
approval of the 1989 Taif Accords which "sacrificed
Lebanese independence" to Syria and his "betrayal" of
Kurdish and Shiite rebels after the first Gulf War.
Rubin was quickly followed by Eliot Cohen, a member of
the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, who, writing in
the Wall Street Journal, mocked the ISG as a
"collection of worthies commissioned by Congress that
has spent several days in Iraq, chiefly in the Green
Zone."
"To think that either (Syria or Iran), with remarkable
records of violence, duplicity and hostility to the
U.S., will rescue us bespeaks a certain willful
blindness," Cohen wrote.
The campaign against Baker and the ISG hotted up after
the Nov. 7 Democratic landslide followed by the
resignation of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his
replacement by Robert Gates, an ISG member who two
years ago had called for negotiations with Tehran.
The Journal published a series of harsh attacks in
mid-November by both Rubin and columnist Bret Stephens
on Baker and other alumni, like Gates, who held top
posts in the realist-dominated administration of
former President George H. W. Bush.
In an appeal to "progressives" who had opposed the
realism of both the Reagan and senior Bush
administrations, Rubin noted that Baker served as
Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and Gates as his deputy
CIA director when Washington sided with Saddam Hussein
in the Iran-Iraq war and "sent people across the third
world to their graves in the cause of U.S. national
interest."
The following day, Stephens blamed Baker for forcing
Israel to take part in the Madrid conference "which
set the groundwork for the Oslo Accords (which) for
Israel... meant more terrorism, culminating in the
second intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant
repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass
radicalisation in the movement of Hamas."
Things got even more personal with columns by Frank
Gaffney, president of the neo-conservative Centre for
Security Policy, and Mark Steyn in the Washington
Times suggesting that Baker's thinking was motivated
as much by anti-Semitism as by realism.
"Jim Baker's hostility towards the Jews is a matter of
record and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the
region," wrote Gaffney, suggesting that the
ISG -- which, in another column published Tuesday, he
called the "Iraq Surrender Group" -- would recommend a
regional approach similar to Madrid that would "throw
free Iraq to the wolves" and "allow the Mideast's only
bona fide democracy, the Jewish State, to be snuffed
in due course."
Indeed, the past week has witnessed a veritable orgy
of Baker- and ISG-bashing, beginning with a Weekly
Standard article by former Republican House of
Representatives Speaker and AEI fellow Newt Gingrich
that warned that "any proposal to ask Iran and Syria
to help is a sign of defeat" and "appeasement".
At the same time, the Washington Post's Charles
Krauthammer, an Iraq war hawk who has blamed
Washington's troubles in that country on the Iraqis
themselves, resurrected the charge that "Baker gave
Lebanon over to Syria as a quid pro quo" for its
backing in the 1991 Gulf War and mocked the notion
that "Iran and Syria have an interest in stability in
Iraq".
For sheer consistency, however, the Weekly Standard,
which in this week's edition featured no less than
three articles denouncing the ISG -- including one
that described the Commission's membership as "deeply
reactionary" and the "K-Mart version of the Congress
of Vienna -- has led the field.
In successive lead editorials by chief editor William
Kristol and Robert Kagan, the magazine first assailed
the notion that Washington should engage Syria and
Iran as "capitulation," and then, reassured by Bush's
declaration last week that he was not prepared to
follow the ISG's advice on talking with either
Damascus or Tehran, accused Baker of having "quite
deliberately created... the disastrous
impression... that the United States is about to
withdraw from Iraq."
"At home and broad, people have been led to believe
that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call
the shots in Iraq from now on. Happily, that is not
the case," according to Kagan and Kristol, who recently
called Bush "the last neocon in power".
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35731
*******************************
Jim Lobe is also a contributor to antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe
Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's
correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has
followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since
well before their rise in the aftermath of the
September 11, 2001 attacks and his expertise has been
recognized by major international media, including the
'Four Corners' public affairs programme of the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation Australia
BroadcastingCorporation; the BBC's 'Panorama' news
magazine and the London-based Al Hayat newspaper,
among others.
IPS has compiled all of Jim's stories on the
neo-conservative ascendancy that he has written for
IPS over the last several years for those interested
in learning more about the neo-conservatives, their
networks and remarkable success in gaining influence
over Bush's foreign policy.
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/neo-cons/index.asp
.
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| User: "PagCal" |
|
| Title: Re: Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report - Whine and Attack JimBaker as enemy of Israel |
08 Dec 2006 06:58:55 AM |
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can_o_worms wrote:
POLITICS-US:
Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35731
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the
neo-conservative press here over the past month, one
would think that former Secretary of State James Baker
poses the biggest threat to the United States and
Israel since Saddam Hussein.
As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once
had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid
guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991
Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by
neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as
close to the devil himself.
But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence
grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose
long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best
extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives
did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday,
has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the
kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious"
French.
The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been
waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the
on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard
and The National Review -- has been to discredit the
ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are
published.
Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague
accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times
and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual
reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of
a much bigger effort at training and strengthening
Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass
appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants
have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there
from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008.
On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen.
John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many
as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They
have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of
Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region,
leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's
anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage
Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as
part of its diplomatic strategy.
McCain doesn't stand a chance at the presidency if he doesn't accept the
commissions report.
.
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| User: "can_o_worms" |
|
| Title: Re: Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report - Whine and Attack Jim Baker as enemy of Israel |
08 Dec 2006 08:19:02 AM |
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On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:58:55 -0500, PagCal <pagcal@runbox.com> wrote:
can_o_worms wrote:
POLITICS-US:
Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35731
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the
neo-conservative press here over the past month, one
would think that former Secretary of State James Baker
poses the biggest threat to the United States and
Israel since Saddam Hussein.
As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once
had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid
guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991
Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by
neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as
close to the devil himself.
But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence
grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose
long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best
extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives
did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday,
has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the
kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious"
French.
The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been
waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the
on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard
and The National Review -- has been to discredit the
ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are
published.
Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague
accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times
and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual
reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of
a much bigger effort at training and strengthening
Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass
appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants
have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there
from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008.
On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen.
John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many
as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They
have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of
Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region,
leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's
anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage
Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as
part of its diplomatic strategy.
McCain doesn't stand a chance at the presidency if he doesn't accept the
commissions report.
Oh he's just posturing for neocon support. Folks would be
surprised how much clout their ***** has among the
electorate still, such as the religious right. I'm hearing
fallout from that quarter by way of ear which validates
Lobes assertion that Baker is considered persona non grata
already.......damn the truth hurts the religious right.
New neoCON favorite McCain is still a force to be reckoned
with in the GOP as is Hillary the Hawk with the Dems.
With Russ Feingold out of the running, I'm thinking Gore
might be the right guy for '08 if no conservative is in the
running.
--
New neoconservative favorite Senator McCain at
"American Israel Public Affairs Committee" Rally :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34139976@N00/163949842/
********
Free downloadable BBC USS Liberty documentary
A BBC video from 2004 called "Dead In The Water - The
Sinking of the USS Liberty", concerning the 1967 attack
on a U.S. intelligence ship by Israel, is available as a
free downloadable AVI - Click your right mouse and select
"download" at the green highlighted URL site at this link:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?yid=video_disseminator
(the file is large, 305 MB)
Video Codec for all computer platforms: 3ivx D4 4.5.1 freeware
http://www.3ivx.com/download/index.html
********
Sen John McCain's Dad Implicated in
Coverup of Murder of US Servicemen.
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.libertarian/browse_frm/thread/cfa8de1c0ec2a131/b2e32efb5882cb23#b2e32efb5882cb23
.
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| User: "PagCal" |
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| Title: Re: Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report - Whine and Attack JimBaker as enemy of Israel |
08 Dec 2006 03:38:17 PM |
|
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can_o_worms wrote:
On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:58:55 -0500, PagCal <pagcal@runbox.com> wrote:
can_o_worms wrote:
POLITICS-US:
Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35731
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the
neo-conservative press here over the past month, one
would think that former Secretary of State James Baker
poses the biggest threat to the United States and
Israel since Saddam Hussein.
As the ur-realist of U.S. Middle East policy who once
had the temerity to threaten to withhold U.S. aid
guarantees from Israel if former right-wing Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir failed to show up at the 1991
Madrid Conference, Baker has long been seen by
neo-conservatives, as well as the Christian Right, as
close to the devil himself.
But his role as co-chairman and presumed eminence
grise of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), whose
long-awaited recommendations on how the U.S. can best
extract itself from a war that the neo-conservatives
did so much to incite will be released here Wednesday,
has provoked a new campaign of vilification of the
kind that they normally reserve for the "perfidious"
French.
The specific aim of the campaign -- which has been
waged virtually daily on the editorial pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the
on-line and printed versions of The Weekly Standard
and The National Review -- has been to discredit the
ISG's presumed conclusions, even before they are
published.
Its recommendations, general and remarkably vague
accounts of which have appeared in the New York Times
and the Washington Post, reportedly include a gradual
reduction in the U.S. combat role in Iraq in favour of
a much bigger effort at training and strengthening
Iraq's army. It is a strategy that the military brass
appear to have already adopted and that ISG consultants
have said could reduce the number of U.S. troops there
from around 140,000 today to 70,000 in 2008.
On the other hand, neoconservatives, backed by Sen.
John McCain among others, favour a "surge" of as many
as 50,000 more troops to stabilise the country. They
have attacked any troop reduction as a betrayal of
Bush's dream of democratising Iraq and the region,
leaving their harshest attacks for the ISG's
anticipated call for Washington to seriously engage
Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq's other neighbours, as
part of its diplomatic strategy.
McCain doesn't stand a chance at the presidency if he doesn't accept the
commissions report.
Oh he's just posturing for neocon support. Folks would be
surprised how much clout their ***** has among the
electorate still, such as the religious right. I'm hearing
fallout from that quarter by way of ear which validates
Lobes assertion that Baker is considered persona non grata
already.......damn the truth hurts the religious right.
New neoCON favorite McCain is still a force to be reckoned
with in the GOP as is Hillary the Hawk with the Dems.
The voters rejects the Neocon world-view last November 7'th. If McCain
continues on that track, he will suffer the same fate.
Hillary shouldn't run either. She's too hawkish and secretive.
With Russ Feingold out of the running, I'm thinking Gore
might be the right guy for '08 if no conservative is in the
running.
--
New neoconservative favorite Senator McCain at
"American Israel Public Affairs Committee" Rally :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34139976@N00/163949842/
********
Free downloadable BBC USS Liberty documentary
A BBC video from 2004 called "Dead In The Water - The
Sinking of the USS Liberty", concerning the 1967 attack
on a U.S. intelligence ship by Israel, is available as a
free downloadable AVI - Click your right mouse and select
"download" at the green highlighted URL site at this link:
http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?yid=video_disseminator
(the file is large, 305 MB)
Video Codec for all computer platforms: 3ivx D4 4.5.1 freeware
http://www.3ivx.com/download/index.html
********
Sen John McCain's Dad Implicated in
Coverup of Murder of US Servicemen.
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.politics.libertarian/browse_frm/thread/cfa8de1c0ec2a131/b2e32efb5882cb23#b2e32efb5882cb23
.
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