It doesn't matter what was proposed on December 6 or that there's no chance it can work any better than current policy. That's for the next administration in 2009 to worry about. What does matter is to convince the public it's a new course, even though it's only smoke and mirrors, and one sensible enough to work that will end the US occupation and involvement in the country but at an unspecified time left unstated because there is none or any intention to leave the country or give up control of its oil treasure. Just like in the run-up to the March, 2003 attack and invasion, the public again has been had, and it remains to be seen how long it will take for it to catch on and continue opposing an illegal war of aggression that never should have been waged in the first place.
Other Omissions in the ISG Report
Start with its members and the interests they represent. Overall it's an assemblage of high-level elitists from past government service working with their counterparts in the military and ideologically-driven right wing think tank experts brought together to find a way to assure the US imperial agenda stays on track meaning despite what its report said, the US is in Iraq to stay as long as there's enough oil in the region to make it worthwhile as that's why we came in the first place along with neutering Saddam to remove Israel's main obstacle to its regional hegemony.
Jim Baker led the group along with his co-chair and leading figure of the 9/11 commission whitewash, former Democrat congressman Lee Hamilton, who's another long-standing loyal servant of empire and serial abuser of the public trust. They and the others on the Commission share another dubious attribute. Like George Bush and his administration co-conspirators, these figures, too, are war criminals along with their other abuses of the public trust that should have put them in the dock of justice and made them be held to account along with George Bush, Dick Cheney and their band of neocon rogues. They never will be in a nation ruled by victor's justice meaning none at all for the law-breakers and a whole lot of injustice for its victims.
Jim Baker's association with crime and scandal is long-standing, but he's always emerged unscatched, his reputation, in fact, enhanced, with each new episode of lawlessness he's played a central role in while navigating safely through each of them. He's done it almost without breaking a sweat in his role as a man at the center of power since the inception of the Reagan administration in 1980. Outside the Bush family, no one is closer or more important to the president's father and former president than Baker. And no one has more influence with him or with other major players in the nation's power establishment, at least on the dominant Republican side. It's why, along with others of his status, he's able to get away with murder and most anything else.
From 1985 - 1988, he was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury after serving as the president's influential White House Chief of Staff from inception (as part of the Baker, Ed Meese, Michael Deaver power troika) till he took over the treasury post. While there, he, more than anyone else (but with a lot of co-conspiratorial help), bore responsibility for the grand theft of over $100 billion in the notorious Savings and Loan scandal that allowed the looting of deregulated banks to take place throughout the country, especially in his home state of Texas where anything goes as long as there's a buck in it for the power elite. He then served as GHW Bush's Secretary of State from 1989 - 1992 playing a major role in crafting administration policy leading to the Gulf war and the unjustifiable sanctions of aggression at its conclusion.
Baker formed his own think tank in 1993 after leaving the Bush administration, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Houston, where the former president happens to live when he's not at his summer home in Maine. It supports "oil and petrodollar conquest" policies, played a major role in post 9/11 policy and the fraudulent "war on terror" making it possible, and is also a prominent attorney connected with the notorious Carlyle Group that's profited enormously from all things connected to the defense establishment and uses the services of GHW Bush in the role of "senior consultant" and master rainmaker/fixer-arranger at a very high price for his services.
Baker also engineered the theft of the 2000 presidential election for the younger Bush by assuring he got the necessary 25 Florida electoral votes and not Al Gore who won them and the presidency he never got because George Bush was chosen for the role regardless of the will of the electorate. Five complicit US Supreme Court justices went along with the scheme to seal the deal and in so doing abrogated their constitutional duty to uphold the law of the land. One of them was commission member Sandra Day O'Connor, now rewarded for her participation in the infamous judicial coup d'etat giving her an encore performance as legal advisor and expert law twister/subverter for the interests of wealth and power she swears allegiance to like all the other members of the "Gang of Ten" co-conspirators.
Baker is their leader and is presented as an respected diplomat and elder statesman sent to rescue the ship of state and Bush administration to keep it afloat and him in the White House at least for another two years. What he is, in fact, is a master criminal/manipulator/schemer, a dangerous and ruthless power broker deserving no public trust who should be made to answer for his malfeasance according to the law he doesn't respect or acknowledge unless he can twist it to serve his interests or those of his clients.
More Omissions - Trashing International Law Including the UN Charter and US Constitution to Wage An Illegal War of Aggression
How could a nation born as a great democratic experiment rebelling against the divine right of monarchs become instead now one worshipping the divine right of capital and capable of being even more repressive. Ben Franklin warned about this early on saying "(The US Constitution) is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism....when the people shall become so corrupted as to need (or not be vigilant enough to prevent) despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Much earlier, Roman historian Tacitus explained what then happens: "They (pillage) the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. They....are greedy....they crave glory....They covet wealth....They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it....'empire.' They make a desert and call it peace." Today they pillage, destroy and enslave in serfdom and call it democracy. They believe it's their right, divine or otherwise, and their cause is just. They lead this nation, and the rest of the world trembles and suffers dearly as long as they rule. The Iraq conflict is just their latest excursion to satisfy their insatiable lust for more wealth, power and glory.
The initial Bush-led "shock and awe" attack against that afflicted country didn't start on March 18, 2003. It began in small, incremental steps continuing the intermittent harassing mostly below-the-radar strikes that went on throughout the 1990s and picked up again after 9/11 as violence in the so-called No-Fly Zone increased and the Washington anti-Saddam demonization rhetoric was rolled out prepping the public for the Iraq war the Bush administration wanted as soon as it came to town.
It only reached full fury in the opening days of the war that began in mid-March, 2003. It's now gone on longer than WW II with no resolution in sight, despite all the lofty disingenuous talk and one over-hyped commission practicing the Sun Tzu Art of War deception on the US public in its cooked up reworked version of the same failed policy of aggressive war and permanent occupation. It has no chance to end the resistance to it unless or until all our forces are unconditionally withdrawn, something this country won't ever agree to but, in the end, will be forced to do just like it had to acknowledge defeat and leave Southeast Asia in 1975. History has a way of repeating for those failing to learn its lessons. This time the price being paid looks a lot stiffer and more painful than the last misadventure, but the full amount won't be known until the current exercise in futility finally ends.
Unstated in any part of the ISG report or in any Washington or mainstream commentary on Iraq policy since the confrontation with Saddam began in January, 1991, is that the US planned and carried out a war of illegal aggression now near completing its 16th year. Early on, this country got some UN-cover by dint of its high-pressure to shape Security Council policy to fit its own. That process, however, broke down in the run-up to the current conflict beginning in March, 2003 when the US pretext for war was so outrageous, enough countries with clout and Security Council veto power opposed us forcing Washington to go it alone with an embarrassing "coalition of the willing." Those countries in it became shameless co-conspirators by agreeing to join in partnership with the US defiantly flaunting international laws and norms as participants in this exercise of lawlessness.
You won't find any of that hinted at in the ISG report. It's not mentioned that this country began by violating Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution that gives the power to declare war solely to the Congress, although it hasn't exercised it since it declared war against the Axis powers in WW II. It also ignores our violating what the Nuremberg Tribunal trying Nazi war criminals called the "supreme international crime" stating: "To initiate a war of aggression....is not only an international crime, it is the supreme crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." And it doesn't mention this country violated the UN Charter that's international law this country is bound by. It allows a nation the right to use force in its self-defense only under two conditions: when authorized to do it by the Security Council or under Article 51 that permits the "right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member....until the Security council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security."
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."
~Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Orwell's nightmare is reality in the 21st century:
"War is Peace"
and decades of USA foreign policy have been fueled by the desire to build empire.
Dissent is what keeps democracies healthy -and post 9/11 dissent has been deemed "unpatriotic"
"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official."
~Theodore Roosevelt
"The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership....a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures." - William Fulbright
Many thanks for your comments and information forwarded. Organizations like yours are vital and I endorse and support your courageous efforts. Would love one of your organizers to contact me in Chicago.
by
Stephen Lendman (268 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 76 comments)
on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 10:27:01 AM
This is an excellent piece of work, and one I will save for future reference.
I would note that Baker is not the only "plant" on that ISG panel. Lawrence Eagleburger, as past President of the Kissinger Group, which represented a coterie of corporations known as "The Forum", wrangled special treatment for them from Sadaam Hussein and they got the choicest oil contracts all through the eighties no matter how many other companies were in the bidding.
You article is an in depth and surprisingly accurate assessment and I thank you for it.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2377 comments)
on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 9:10:48 AM
Many thanks for your generous comments. Felt had to write this as hadn't found anyone else who did and think it all is central. Wish I could get Baker and his "Gang of Ten" to read even though wouldn't make a bit of difference.
by
Stephen Lendman (268 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 76 comments)
on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 10:11:47 AM
the ISG report had no 'omissions'. Rather it was a part of deliberate exercise of wasting the taxpayer's money to cover the butts of our Vampires. Mr. Lendman as usual demonstrated a superb job and... no one pays him for it. They do not pay for the truth nowadays.
Thanks, Mr. Lendman
by
Mark Sashine (53 articles, 19 quicklinks, 249 diaries, 3570 comments)
on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 10:58:02 AM
Many thanks and would tell you in my retirement and able to pay my bills I want no compensation other than to energize people to action - to stand up for our rights now lost and demand their restoration and an end to rule by the criminal class.
by
Stephen Lendman (268 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 76 comments)
on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 11:03:30 AM
Even if the Baker Report was truly an attempt to underpin a false mythology to provide cover for a venture gone disastrously wrong, it seems that GWB has no intention of seeking or following any directions that might mess with his opinions - no matter how out of touch with reality events have proven them to be.
He seems oblivious that the Baker Report is the best lifebelt avaiable. Granted, it is not very buoyant, but if he grabs and swims hard in the right direction he might just make it to 2008. That is what Baker was tasked with; Iraq was merely the major constraint.
But Bush's opinions are rigid and must support themselves (certainly they aren't supported by much else). They cannot flex without shattering.
Bush is little more than rigid opinions. He cannot flex them, and so he's going to sink.
by
cam (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 55 comments)
on Friday, December 15, 2006 at 8:32:49 AM
7 comments
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