The will to prevail fails in Iraq Study Group

Mark Steyn:

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God, I can't go on. I'd rather watch Mia Farrow making out with Mickey Rooney to a Doobie Brothers LP. As its piece de resistance, the Baker Commission concluded its deliberations by inviting testimony from -- drumroll, please -- Sen. John F. Kerry. If you're one of those dummies who goofs off in school, you wind up in Iraq. But, if you're sophisticated and nuanced, you wind up on a commission about Iraq
Rounding it all out -- playing David Gest to Jim Baker's Liza -- is, inevitably, co-chair Lee Hamilton, former Democratic representative from Indiana. As you'll recall, he also co-chaired the September 11 Commission, in accordance with Article II Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution which states: "Ye monopoly of wisdom on ye foreign policy, national security and other weighty affairs shall be vested in a retired representative from the 9th District in Indiana, if he be sufficiently venerable of mien. In the event that he becomes incapacitated, his place shall be taken by Jill St. John." I would call for a blue-ribbon Commission to look into whether we need all these blue-ribbon Commissions but they would probably get Lee Hamilton to chair that, too.
Don't get me wrong, I like a Friars' Club Roast as much as the next guy and I'm sure Jim Baker kibitzing with John Kerry was the hottest ticket in town. But doesn't it strike you as just a tiny bit parochial? Aside from Mr. Kerry, I wonder whether the commission thought to hear from anyone such as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore. A couple of years back, on a visit to Washington just as the Democrat-media headless-chicken quagmire-frenzy was getting into gear, he summed it up beautifully:
"The key issue is no longer WMD [weapons of mass destruction] or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail."
As I write in my new book, Singaporean Cabinet ministers apparently understand that more clearly than U.S. senators, representatives and former secretaries of state. Or, as one Baker Commission grandee told the New York Times, "We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out."
An "exit strategy" on those terms is the path out not just from Iraq but from a lot of other places, too -- including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, China, the South Sandwich Islands. America would be revealed to the world as a fraud: a hyperpower that's all hype and no power -- or, at any rate, no will. According to the New York Sun, "An expert adviser to the Baker-Hamilton commission expects the 10-person panel to recommend that the Bush administration pressure Israel to make concessions in a gambit to entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference."
On the face of it, this sounds an admirably hard-headed confirmation of James Baker's most celebrated sound bite on the Middle East "peace process": "[expletive] the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway." His recommendations seem intended to [expletive] the Jews well and truly by making them the designated fall guys for Iraq. But hang on: if Israel could be forced to give up the Golan Heights and other land (as some fantasists suggest) in order to persuade the Syrians and Iranians to ease up on killing coalition forces in Iraq, our enemies would have learned an important lesson: The best way to weaken Israel is to kill Americans. I'm all for Bakerite cynicism, but this would seem to [expletive] not just the Jews but the Americans, too.
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The premise of the Baker group is based on the false assumption that we are losing in Iraq. This is just nonsense. The Sunnis insurgency has lost and continues fighting now as a don't mess with us message to the Shia who are sending out their death squads to kill Sunni in their own don't mess with us messaging strategy.

While the result is this appears to be chaos when presented by the media, it over looks the important message that is not being sent. None of these messengers have the means or the will any longer to overthrow the government. The Sunnis certainly do not and the Shia militia doesn't need to because it is already got a seat at the table in the government.

It would be a mistake to make the US responsible for not stopping this "chaos." The US should continue to use Iraq as a honey trap for defeating al Qaeda and make that the focus of its efforts while training the Iraqi government forces to take more responsibility in that fight.