Redstate

Iraq Study Group, Part Five

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I rarely quote Democrats approvingly but in this case I’m willing to make a one time exception:

Separately, in another indication of the difficulties the commission's recommendations may encounter in Congress, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, characterized the Iraq Study Group report as "theater" and "devoid of any basis in reality" because it offers what he considers overly ambitious plans that almost certainly cannot be carried out.

"The practical realities of these empty recommendations will be clear when we try to implement any of this stuff," Abercrombie said in an interview.

Abercrombie has a lifetime American Conservative Union lifetime rating of 8. I suspect we would find much to disagree about on the subject of Iraq but we are united in our disdain for the amateurish report churned out by the ISG.

Read on.

Rarely, it seems, has an independent commission report wilted so rapidly after its initial release.

In this particular case that is a good thing. This is an exceptionally shallow report that to my view is calculated to do nothing more than allow the advocates of pre-1991 diplomacy the opportunity to lecture the Administration’s foreign policy team on how professionals would do diplomacy if they were in charge. Indeed, yesterday seemed to pull an Al Haig in regards to US Iraq policy.

I must admit I am at a loss to explain the reception of this report by the Congress and the media (likewise here and here). It isn’t because of the immediacy and the importance of the subject. The 9/11 Commission produced a similarly corrupt and misleading report on a subject every bit as important as Iraq and did so with the transparent agenda of creating equivalence between the Bush Administration’s actions in eight months in office and the Clinton Administration’s eight years. Its recommendations were no less suspect than the ISG’s yet most of them have made their way into law.

Maybe it was the overreach of attempting to tie a solution to Iraq to an intractable problem, and Israel-Arab comprehensive peace deal, that queered the pitch, so to speak. I think most foreign affairs and diplomatic correspondents have covered enough conferences on the Middle East to write the end of that story from the comfort of their living room.

Maybe it was the bizarre insistence that Iran and Syria could and should be brought into the mix as formal participants without preconditions and with the upfront admission that a lot of the mess is of their creation that led others to view the entire report skeptically.

Maybe a lot of politicians know that their constituents aren’t happy with the situation in Iraq but they will be even less happy with something that looks, smells, and tastes like a defeat there.

Maybe, as Dan McLaughlin notes a lot of people noticed the total lack of subject matter expertise on the part of the ISG and recognized their dissent-free report for what it was: a bipartisan effort to give political cover to all parties for a US withdrawal from Iraq.

Regardless of the reason the ISG report seems headed for the ash heap of history. For that we can all be thankful this season.