Giuliani v. Baker

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Now that the Secretary of State Baker has made public his recommendations in respect of Iraq it’s becoming clear why Mayor Giuliani quietly dropped off the commission not long after it got up and running. Our Eli Lake has particulars on page one. The nub of the advice from Mr. Baker and Lee Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, and their colleagues is that America should cut and run. The “cut” part is that the commission wants America to cut a deal with Iraq’s neighbors — nearly every one of which is an enemy of America and the idea of a free Iraq — and the “run” part is to pull our GIs out of the fight by the start of the election season in 2008.

The persons who speak on background for Mr. Giuliani, ever the graceful diplomat, stress that the former mayor really did sense that the commission was going to take too much of his time. In addition, he had concluded the commission was a place for retired politicians, not for those who could be running for president next year. Mr. Giuliani himself praised the report yesterday at a public appearance. But the way to translate Mr. Giuliani’s action is that anyone who ran for president on a platform of retreat in the middle of a major world war couldn’t get elected dog catcher.

Not that Mr. Giuliani was looking out for merely his own interests. He deserves great credit. The Baker commission has gone the wrong way on important matters of principle, something no doubt Mr. Giuliani spotted not long after he got horn-swoggled into joining the group. Not only does the commission recommend negotiations with the various Middle East tyrannies, but it wants to use as coin in these negotiations the security — and even sovereignty — of the state of Israel. Outsiders first got a glimpse of this last week in a story by our Mr. Lake, quoting an e-mail sent by one of the expert advisers to Mr. Baker’s group.

The expert, Raymond Close, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, said he expected “any realistic chance of success” would depend on “a major initiative, promoted and vigorously supported by the United States, to reach a comprehensive resolution to the Israel-Arab crisis through a process of reasonable compromise and accommodation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.” Wrote Mr. Close, according to Mr. Lake’s report, “perhaps the US will have to put pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions in the Golan.”

Mr. Lake’s report, not to mention Mr. Close’s expectation, proved all-too-accurate. Recommendation 16 of the Baker commission: “the Israelis should return the Golan Heights.” How rewarding terrorism in Iraq with concessions of strategic land to the undemocratic, terrorist-hosting Baathist regime at Damascus is in America’s national interest is beyond us. The report goes so far as to claim that Iraqi opposition to America “spiked in the aftermath of Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon.” Talk about a blame-Israel-first mentality.

Even for those who, unlike this newspaper, do not rank security of Israel as one, albeit only one, of the original war aims, the Baker commission report represents a triumph of Brent Scowcroft-ism of the kind that helped cost George H.W. Bush a second term in the White House. It would have us drop the ambition of regime change in the country, Iran, with one of the cruelest and most hostile regimes. And then to top it off Messrs. Baker and Hamilton want to to set milestones for Iraq’s legislature.

Or, to put it another way, barely a year after the Iraqis gave the world an inspiring example of courage, with millions going to the polls in the face of enemy threats, Messrs. Baker and Hamilton want to tell the legislature the Iraqis elected what to do. Finally, Messrs. Baker and Hamilton want the formation of a broad-ranging “contact group” of Iraq’s neighbors. We predict that will lead to peace talks with an enemy who doesn’t want peace and just before the 2008 election a next-generation Henry Kissinger will come out before the cameras and declare “peace is at hand.” Don’t forget what happened next.

By our lights, though, the worst damage of the Baker commission’s recommendations, if they are adopted, won’t be to Israel or to the political hopes of American Republicans but to the cause of freedom and democracy around the world and the American national security on which it rests. The commission’s message to our enemies and to our potential allies is that if enough Americans are killed, America’s foreign policy elite will give up on its core values of freedom and democracy and return to the pre-September 11 mode of coddling Middle East dictators, putting oil and a façade of “stability” ahead of America’s long-term security.

The list of those with whom the Baker commission consulted includes dozens of foreign ambassadors, former generals, and newspaper columnists, but not a single widow of a New York City firefighter. Mayor Giuliani spoke at the funerals of so many firefighters that it is understandable that he would not want to follow the Baker commission’s recommendation to return to the approach that America pursued before September 11. And as he sets out in quest of the White House, he can be proud of the fact that he stepped down from the Baker commission before its report was written.


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