Cleaning up Bush's really big adventure

Cleaning up Bush's really big adventure
By Georgie Anne Geyer, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Universal Press Syndicate
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published November 17, 2006

WASHINGTON -- I spent an unusual day with George W. Bush in the fall of 2000, just before he was first elected president. During that interview, I innocently said to him, "I suppose you're getting a lot of help from Jim Baker."

To my amazement, his entire face contorted almost grotesquely, but the exchange over his father's close friend continued: "Oh, Jimmy," George W. said then, his voice thick with condescending derision. "I talk to him maybe twice a year."

How amazing is life! For now, that same "Jimmy" Baker stands on W.'s fractured horizon as the besieged president's only savior--not to mention as the agent of his father's retribution.

On that day six years ago, we also spoke of his father, the first President Bush, and W. had tears in his eyes. But how cruel is life! For in his six years in the presidency, the younger Bush has moved inexorably, and until now effectively, to destroy his father's legacy by wiping out just about everything that the Eastern Establishment Bushes believed in and painstakingly built.

So now, James Baker III is moving back into Washington, and his Iraq Study Group is virtually the only hope for ending the Iraq war and returning America to its traditional place of respect in the world. We can see why he has so often been called the "velvet hammer": Baker is unquestionably the only American statesman of the last five administrations who combines brilliant cunning, supreme common sense and uncommon personal decency.

When he and his co-chairman, Democrat Lee Hamilton, release their report from the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group in December, what rabbits will they pull out of their hats? What foreign policy tactics and truth should they pull out of their hats?

There are a few things we already know from leaks and speculation about their carefully guarded work: 1) The report will stress stability in Iraq rather than democracy; 2) it will set up appropriate systems for talking to Iran and Syria; 3) members will not advise for partition of the three Iraqi groups (Kurd, Shiite, Sunni); 4) they will consider seriously the idea of "redeploy and contain," moving American troops into surrounding countries to be used only in emergencies; 5) and they might advise the "stability first" idea, which would focus the United States on stabilizing Baghdad and turning it into a model for the rest of the country.

Baker, as secretary of state under Father Bush, was not only instrumental in freeing Eastern Europe, in allowing the Soviet Union to collapse with some dignity and in judiciously conducting the Gulf War of 1991, but he was intimately involved in attempts to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. It was Baker who designed, oversaw and carried to creative fruition the Madrid Conference in 1991, which made possible the 1993 Oslo Accords--which nearly resulted in peace between the Israelis and Palestinians over five years in the mid-'90s.

But the current President Bush has been so enamored of his warmaking capacities and so enchanted by the demands of the Israeli lobby that the hatred between those two peoples has festered almost to civil war there.

Baker's Iraq Study Group needs, above all, to remove us from the singularity of Iraq, to move to re-establish American justice and power in the Middle East by convincing the moderate Arab regimes that we will tackle--and solve--the Palestinian problem. We need to alter the perception of "America" today as a country obsessed with Iraq and return it to its historical fair negotiator role.

This would mean putting pressures on the Palestinians and Israelis alike, and Jim Baker is practically the only one who could and would be tough enough to do it. (Oh yes, I know, you've heard this for years--that doesn't make it any less true.)

Ironically, despite the seeming hopelessness of the Iraq situation, many voices in the Middle East still support an Israeli/Palestinian settlement. The Saudi proposal of March 2002, signed by 22 Arab states--calling for the two states to recognize each other fully, for the formation of a workable Palestinian state and for a return to the pre-1967 borders--is still viable. In only the last few weeks, Egypt, Jordan, Germany and Great Britain have called, again, for such a peace process. All it needs is for a serious American push.

With Baker, perhaps there is a chance to return to the centrist, moral, politically savvy values of Father Bush's administration, in place of the hubristic, imperialistic, amoral, politically ignorant values that "Sonny," as many of the senior Bush's generation now refer to the president, has imposed upon the country.

Think of the elegant words that Father Bush gave us earlier this year at a celebration of the uniting of the two Germanys, and you'll see where we came from--and what we must return to.

"We rose above the recriminations of the past," he said, "and broke a chain of human discontent and resolved our affairs not with rifles but with reason. For once, mankind did not fall back on a primeval reflex for violence, but instead asserted the `better angels' of human nature."

In the name of the father, amen.

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Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington. E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com