Baker's Panel Rules Out Iraq Victory http://www.nysun.com/article/41371 10/12/06 "The Sun" -- -- WASHINGTON — A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials. Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain," both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term. More telling, however, is the ruling out of two options last month. One advocated minor fixes to the current war plan but kept intact the long-term vision of democracy in Iraq with regular elections. The second proposed that coalition forces focus their attacks only on Al Qaeda and not the wider insurgency. Instead, the commission is headed toward presenting President Bush with two clear policy choices that contradict his rhetoric of establishing democracy in Iraq. The more palatable of the two choices for the White House, "Stability First," argues that the military should focus on stabilizing Baghdad while the American Embassy should work toward political accommodation with insurgents. The goal of nurturing a democracy in Iraq is dropped. The option papers, which sources inside the commission have stressed are still being amended and revised as the panel wraps up its work, give a clearer picture of what Mr. Baker meant in recent interviews when he called for a course adjustment. They also shed light on what is at stake in the coming 2 1/2 months for the Iraqi government. The "Redeploy and Contain" option calls for the phased withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq, though the working groups have yet to say when and where those troops will go. The document, read over the telephone to the Sun, says America should "make clear to allies and others that U.S. redeployment does not reduce determination to attack terrorists wherever they are." It also says America's top priority should be minimizing American casualties in Iraq. Both Mr. Baker and his Democratic co-commissioner, Lee Hamilton, have said for nearly a month that the coming weeks and months are crucial for the elected body in Baghdad. More recently, Mr. Baker has said he is leaning against counseling the president to withdraw from Iraq. Mr. Bush yesterday spoke approvingly of his father's old campaign manager and top diplomat, saying he looked forward to seeing "what Jimmy Baker and Lee Hamilton have to say about getting the job done." The president also said he was not averse to changing tactics. But he repeated that the strategic goal in Iraq is to build "a country which can defend itself, sustain itself, and govern itself." He added, "The strategic goal is to help this young democracy succeed in a world in which extremists are trying to intimidate rational people in order to topple moderate governments and to extend the caliphate." But the president's strategic goal is at odds with the opinion of Mr. Baker's expert working groups, which dismiss the notion of victory in Iraq. The "Stability First" paper says, "The United States should aim for stability particularly in Baghdad and political accommodation in Iraq rather than victory." Mr. Baker in recent days has subtly been sounding out this theme with interviewers. On PBS's "Charlie Rose Show," Mr. Baker was careful to say he believed the jury was still out on whether Iraq was a success or a failure. But he also hastened to distinguish between a Middle East that was "democratic" and one that was merely "representative." "If we are able to promote representative, representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, it will have been a success," he said. That distinction is crucial, according to one member of the expert working groups. "Baker wants to believe that Sunni dictators in Sunni majority states are representative," the group member, who requested anonymity, said. Both option papers would compel America to open dialogue with Syria and Iran, two rogue states that Iraqi leaders and American military commanders say are providing arms and funds to Iraq's insurgents. "Stabilizing Iraq will be impossible without greater cooperation from Iran and Syria," the "Stability First" paper says. The option also calls on America to solicit aid and support from the European Union and the United Nations, though both bodies in the past have spurned requests for significant aid for Iraq. Because of the politically explosive topic of the Baker commission, the panel has agreed not to release its findings until after the November 7 elections. The commission, formally known as the Iraq Study Group, was created by Congress in legislation sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican of Virginia and close confidant of Mr. Bush's. Mr. Baker has said he will likely present the panel's findings in December.
So what the President has been spouting off is bull****. Campaign rhetoric, with no basis in reality. What the commission is going to recommend is what the Democratic Party is running on in this election. And yet the Bush Administration, the RNC, and the GOP congressmen babbling their "cut and run" crap will change completely after the election. What a completely bankrupt government. Far past time to be rid of them. Keep D&D Civil.
The report should be out shortly following the elections. However, I wouldn't be surprised if we have a few 'leaked' parts here and there before then.
Thanks for stating the obvious. It's a good thing the American public seemed to start figuring this out the last couple of months, even without this report. If enough of this gets leaked, the Bush-ites will have to comment on it before the election because it shows them to be the complete and utter liars they are. When I think about the lost lives, our maimed & wounded military and the fact we could end up losing Afghanistan because of this Iraq debacle/distraction, it just makes me so mad. It's hard to believe, but I never got this upset at the Clintonistas. Not close.
it's pretty sad seeing these guys continually get punked. I really really hate bush now. not just for this but for basically everything. if anyone watched that olbermann piece on the military commissions act and bush saying that debating the bill was helping the terrorists. that guy is really an *******. what a joke.
I know it has been pointed out elsewhere, but if they panel knows changes need to be made, then why wait? Why let folks serving their nation over there increase their chance of dying for a few more votes? Making political pawns out of our servicemen is disgraceful.
Exactly!! This administration is just using our military for their own selfish agenda. They do not even care for their own armed forces, so why would they give a damn about democracy for the Iraqis?? And then these clowns come on TV and say the American soldiers are sacrificing to make America safe. The hypocricy is rampant.
i disagree about bush caring about democracy for the iraqis. i think he believes he can create a liberal democracy there and that is the problem. he just doesn't live in reality. no contingency planning and no exit planning...utterly stupid. this is reason #102484982 not to trust the "smarter" people in the room just because they are in the position of power. that goes for any aspect of life...business, government, education, society, and so on.
It makes the motivation of the armchair warmongers on this BBS, and throughout the US, quite clear. It has nothing to do with "freedom" or "spreading democracy". It's a shell game - and probably goes hand in hand with why those same jerks wouldn't ever enlist - they know that the armed forces are being used.
Bush should know Iraq is a lost cause, although he could be delusional. So force the Dems. to put an end to US involvement. Then when Iraqis civil war goes full tilt and the Shiites win the conservatives can say "see what the Dems. did, we should have stayed", thus trying to protect Bush's legacy and they can then blame the Dems. for the whole mess, which is what the Republicans do best.
I'm more concerned about the Senate, believe it or not. They are the ones who approve the lifetime Federal judicial appointments, including the Supreme Court. Those lifetime appointments will be harming the country, our constitution, our rights as citizens long after the idiot in the White House is cutting brush fulltime on his "ranch." Keep D&D Civil.
The Bush-ites know how bad the Iraq situation is, they just will not admit it. Doing so would be political suicide. Remember, the whole invasion and occupation has been run like a short-term campaign event instead of a war. That is the whole problem (besides the fact the invasion itself was a HUUUUUUUGE mistake to start with). If the GOP admits they were wrong about Iraq and that so many sacrifices have been made in vain, the wrath of American voters and of our servicemen (and women) would blast them into permanent exile. One of my fears is that if/when we legitimately need to exercise a future military option, it will be impossible to convince the majority of Americans and the country will be ripped apart even more when we should be unified.
This is an excerpt from something everyone should read. I kept trying to pare down what I'm quoting, and it's damned near impossible. This is a national shame and an outrage. I'll bold the highlights, but there are too many depressing ones to do it justice. Remember this the next time you listen to Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld make their platitudes towards our service men and women, in order to make the evening news: Coming Home from War on the Cheap Shortchanging the Wounded Unfortunately, in our draft-free country, the fight to protect the Veteran's Administration and to fully fund it has gone on largely out of public sight. Other than the Washington Post and the Associated Press, relatively few journalistic organizations have bothered to regularly cover the VA. The fight over it that White House hatchetmen, VA political appointees, and their allies in Congress have had with Congressional critics (Democratic and Republican) along with veterans' organizations has been monitored closely only by veterans' websites like Larry Scott's VAWatchdog.com, veteransforcommonsense.org and military.com. "Enron-styled Accounting" While national deficits soar, thanks in part to skyrocketing war costs, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are flooding into the increasingly underfunded VA system. The Pentagon says that 2,389 Americans have died and 17,648 have been wounded in combat in Iraq (and another 285 have died in Afghanistan). But these casualty figures seem to be significant undercounts. After all, 144,424 American veterans have sought treatment from the VA system since returning from those wars, not including soldiers actually hospitalized in military hospitals. These figures were wrested only recently from the Veteran's Administration after years of fruitless demands from Democrats on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. The 144,424 figure includes not only many of those 17,648 reported wounded in combat by the Pentagon -- if that figure is, in fact, accurate -- but those wounded psychologically, those injured in accidents, and those whose ailments were caused or exacerbated by service in the war. (Think of war, in this sense, as an extreme sport in its toll on the body.) Of course, neither Pentagon, nor VA figures for the wounded include estimates of those soldiers or veterans who don't show up at a Department of Defense (DoD) or VA facility. Among these casualties are post-combat-tour suicides (who obviously can't show up) and the victims of diseases like leishmaniasis, caused by the ubiquitous sand flies in Iraq, who often suffer on their own. Nonetheless, the VA has admitted -- and it's been confirmed by an Army study -- that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems from the war. Add this to the older veterans, especially from the Vietnam era, pouring into the VA system as their war wounds, both physical and emotional, deepen with age or as, on retirement, they find they can no longer afford private health insurance and realize that VA health care is -- or, at least in the past, was -- more generous than Medicare. Just as the Pentagon failed, after its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, to plan for keeping the peace, guarding against looting, fighting a resilient insurgency, or handling a civil war, so has the Veterans Administration failed to plan for caring for casualties of the war. The VA admitted recently that 33,858 more vets showed up for treatment in just the first quarter of FY2006 than were expected for the entire year. Do the math yourself. Multiply times 4, assuming that the war goes on injuring Americans at current levels, and you get a possible underestimate of 135,000 casualties for the year. Even more distressing, the San Diego Union recently reported that mentally ill soldiers are being sent back to war armed only with antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. The Union quotes Sydney Hickey of the National Military Family Association as saying that "more than 200,000 prescriptions for the most common antidepressants were written in the last 14 months for service members and their families." According to the Union, an Army study also found that 17% of combat-seasoned infantrymen suffer from major depression, anxiety, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after a single tour in Iraq. California Sen. Barbara Boxer has called for an investigation. Are such chronic underestimates merely the result of incompetence? Not according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's investigative arm. In a series of reports on the Veterans Administration over the last three years, the GAO found that the VA's top officials submitted budget requests based on cost limits demanded by the White House, not on realistic expectations of how many veterans would actually need medical care or disability support. In repeated testimony before Congress, top VA political appointees have opposed demands by veterans' groups like the American Legion and the Disabled Veterans of America to increase significantly funds for medical care and disability payments for the new patients now flooding the system. Top VA officials assured Congress that more money wasn't needed because the agency had stepped up "management efficiencies." But the GAO found that, from 2003-2006, there were no obvious management efficiencies whatsoever to offset the increased treatment costs from the Iraq War, nor did the VA even have a methodology for reporting on such alleged efficiencies. While the GAO's findings, when describing the VA's budget manipulations, were couched in such relatively polite bureaucratic euphemisms as "misleading," "lacked a methodology," and "does not have a reliable basis," the conclusions nonetheless were striking. "The GAO report confirms what everyone has known all along," American Legion National Commander Thomas L. Bock commented. "The VA's health-care budget has been built on false claims of 'efficiency' savings, false actuarial assumptions and an inability to collect third-party reimbursements -- money owed them. This budget model has turned our veterans into beggars, forced to beg for the medical care they earned and, by law, deserve. These deceptions are especially unconscionable when American men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan." Some veterans are calling it fraud. Rep. Lane Evans (Dem.-Ill.) of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee calls it "Enron-styled accounting." Budget Busting The economic realities of the wars the Bush administration has taken us into are, in truth, budget busting. A recent study by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard management expert Linda Biones -- that actually factored the costs of "coming home" into war expenditures -- sets the total cost of the Iraq War between $1 and 2 trillion, including $122 billion in disability payments and $92 billion in health care for veterans. Pentagon health-care costs for soldiers still in the military have doubled in the last five years and are projected to total $64 billion or 12% of the official Pentagon budget by 2015, according to William Winkenwerder, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Soaring American medical costs are only partly to blame. Advances in combat medical care have also meant that far more wounded soldiers are being kept alive than in earlier wars, many of them with serious brain injuries and/or multiple amputations. Taking care of these tragically maimed soldiers for life will be extraordinarily costly, both in terms of medical care and their 100% disability payments. (The VA rates disability on a scale of 0 to 100%, which then determines the size of the monthly disability payment due a veteran.) Even before recent veterans began flooding the system, the VA was already underfunded and being criticized for poor services. Then, three years ago, Rep. Evans and Rep. Chris H. Smith, (Rep.-NJ), Chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, raised the alarm that the VA, already short of funds, would face a catastrophe as the troops began returning from Iraq. Smith was rewarded for his efforts to sound the alarm by being removed not just from his chairmanship, but from the committee altogether, by the House Republican leadership. Similarly, in November 2004, VA head Anthony Principi was forced out by the White House because of his opposition to the VA being shortchanged in the budget the White House demanded -- so lobbyists for veterans believe. But Principi seems not to have suffered from his VA experience. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that a medical services company Principi headed, and returned to after running the VA, earned over a billion dollars in fees, much of it from contracts approved while Principi was VA chief. The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has reached 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of rating claims took six months to process -- no small thing for a veteran wounded badly enough to be unable to work. An appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed already by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the administration has constantly resisted congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10168 And it goes on. Truly depressing and shocking reading. This is a national outrage. Keep D&D Civil.
Shades of the 70s when the veteran's treatment was so shoddy by the government. You're right that this is an outrage. The sad part is I'm not sure one party treats them any better than another. I like stuff like the ballistic missle defense, but I wouldn't oppose putting it off to get more resources into issues like this.
What a damned shame. Hayes, I do think one party treats them better at least that one party would not have sent them to fight this war which apparently can't be won, and I doubt that they could have handeled it anymore carelessly than the current administration.
The system for most of the VA benefits is intentionally set up to asure that most veterans won't use the majority of the benefits. It's complexity is staggering. The real experts on this are the VA counselers in the regional offices, many of whom are veterans themselves. It's not hard to get one of them on a rant about how the government is abusing veterans. They're still working to get me back pay on GI Bill benefits from the Spring Semester. I was considered to be taking a 75% load because I took French, which the VA does not consider part of the curiculuum (sp?) for an Engineering student, despite the fact that it is required for that degree at my school. It's totally ridiculous, and it cost me about $2000 last semester alone. I'm not in danger of leaving school for financial reasons, but someone else in the same situation is. The bottom line is that we were recruited with these types of promises. My problem is trivial compared to the soldiers and Marines fighting an uphill battle just to receive their due in medical care and the like. This defnitely isn't a partisan issue. It's a huge problem that probably won't ever be corrected.
