The Bark Blog

Former Secretary of State for Bush Sr., James Baker, is hard at work on a bipartisan commission to create an alternative Iraq policy to sell to the current Bush Administration.

Since April, operating almost entirely under the radar, the task force has spawned four working groups, recruiting scores of U.S. experts on Iraq and the Middle East to look at military and security issues, Iraqi politics, reconstruction, and the regional and strategic environment surrounding the war.

Although it’s nice to see some serious effort to design a bipartisan policy for Iraq — and some would say that Baker is one of the few heavyweights with enough leverage to change the President’s mind — it’s still a shame that the process is being so methodically buried in secrecy:

It’s hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. … “[Baker is] very secretive, he keeps his distance, and he compartmentalizes everything, which is not a bad way to organize a political conspiracy,” says another member of one of the working groups.

Furthermore, although Baker is claiming to avoid politicizing the effort…

In any case, the Iraq Study Group won’t issue its report until some time early in 2007. In a recent speech, according to a member of the task force, Baker said that to do something before the November 2006 elections would inevitably politicize the report, something that Baker desperately wants to avoid.

…his deeper and ultimate goals seem to be protecting the 2008 elections.

…if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008.