Soccer Dad

Baker dozin'

Carla Anne Robbins an editorial observer for the New York is Waiting (and Hoping) for James Baker. She isn't just waiting and hoping, she's dozin' and dreamin' for a James Baker that never really existed. Her essay says more about her than it does about him. Early on she writes

When I traveled with Mr. Baker as a member of the State Department press corps, it was evident that he was a good secretary of state, but far from perfect. Like his boss and best friend, President George H. W. Bush, Mr. Baker lacked the vision thing. He failed to foresee the murderous passions unleashed by Yugoslavia’s breakup — and then declared that the United States did “not have a dog in that fight” — or that oil wealth and autocrats couldn’t forever contain the anger roiling the Middle East.

I'd give lower marks for other things that he failed to foresee. He failed to foresee allowing his ambassador to encourage Saddam might embolden him to attack Kuwait. He failed to see that leaving the Shi'ites to Saddam's tender mercies would after encouraging them to revolt and then not protecting them would be a disaster.

She also remembers

But Mr. Baker was a brilliant and indefatigable deal maker, willing to talk to anyone if it could get him to yes. He flew overnight from Yemen to Colombia trying to persuade all 15 Security Council members to vote for the Persian Gulf war, and sat down in New York with the Cubans. (Final tally, 12 to 2, with one abstention.) Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s president then, sent troops to fight in the war— on America’s side.

Afterward, Mr. Baker ping-ponged across the Middle East trying to broker a peace deal. The strategy was pure Baker: get everybody face-to-face in an ornate room — preferably with the whole world watching — and the next time any of them got angry they’d think about calling a meeting rather than ordering an invasion.

Flying from Damascus to Jerusalem to Cairo to Jeddah, I groused about diplomacy-by-epiphany. And in the end, there were many meetings and no peace. But there was also no war between Israel and its neighbors throughout the 1990s.

Well he didn't try to engage every country. One in particular he saw as a candidate for pressure.

There was evidence from the beginning that this U.S. administration was going to push Israel hard. Back in February 1989, in his first interview as Secretary of State, James Baker explained to Time magazine that diplomacy was like a turkey hunt. Paraphrasing: "You have got to fatten up the turkeys. I have this assistant who puts out the feed, he fattens up the turkeys, you get them good and fat, and then you shoot them." When asked what country he had in mind, he answered "Israel!"

But bullying Israel didn't work. Israel did make concessions. And if you compare the political posiition (in terms of some sort of peace process) of the centrist Israeli government currently in power with the Israeli Left of 1989 (when Baker started serving as Secretary of State for the first President Bush) you could probably argue that there isn't much difference between the two. (Even the "right-wing" Likud of today probably has more in common with Peace Now or Meretz of 1989 than with the Likud of the same time.)

And is Israel more secure? Is the Middle East less volatile? Israel has changed and conceded a lot. The Palestinians have been more than happy to receive land and money from Israel, but they've been rather reticent in even saying the right things about coexistence, much less doing anything about it.

Robbins laments that under the current President Bush

... no effort to bring Israelis and Palestinians together in any room — ornate or not.

The problem is that while James Baker was bold enough to tell AIPAC that Israel needed to abandon the idea of Greater Israel, there has been no one insisting that the Palestinians (and the Arab/Muslim world in general) give up the dream of greater Palestine. In the end peace can only come when Israel's neighbors accept its legitimacy. No amount of pressure on Israel will bring the Arab/Muslim world around.

Robbins's memory of an indealized James Baker may make the former diplomat seem like a far better diplomat than anyone currently serving under the current President Bush. In reality his record is somewhat more mixed than Robbins acknowledges.

UPDATE: Bret Stephens wrote an excellent refresher for those who are nostalgic for Bush 41 (via memeorandum) and specifically James Baker. For one thing he gives the specifics of the first Bush administration's mistakes in the Middle East

For its efforts, the Bush administration brought Arabs and Israelis together for the Madrid Peace Conference, which set the groundwork for the Oslo Accords. These were touted as historic achievements, but for Israel it meant more terrorism, culminating in the second intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass radicalization in the movement of Hamas. Worse, Mr. Baker fostered the fatal perception that the failure of Arabs and Jews to make peace was the root of the region's problems, not a symptom of them, and that the obstacle to peace was intransigent Israel, not militant Islam. Bob Gates later gave voice to that perception when he wrote, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, that the road to Mideast peace must "not kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's obstructionism."

Michael Young in an eerily prescient essay also noted

It was music to Syrian President Bashar Assad's ears to hear James Baker, the Republican co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, advocating dialogue with Syria and Iran in an interview last month: "I don't think you restrict your conversations to your friends." The Iraq Study Group's report, expected in the coming weeks, will possibly include such an invitation. Syria's Lebanese foes fear they will pay if the U.S. and Damascus cut a deal.
If so, it wouldn't be the first time for Mr. Baker. In 1990, he was a leading light in President George H.W. Bush's administration, which ceded Lebanon to Syria in exchange for President Hafez Assad's agreement to be part of the international coalition against Iraq. An inveterate "realist," Mr. Baker is not likely to balk at negotiating with Mr. Assad if it means the U.S. can buy some peace of mind as it transforms its presence in Iraq. His proposal is unpopular at the White House, and last week Mr. Bush made that known to Mr. Baker and his colleagues. However, because of his electoral defeat, the president, pressed by a Congress avidly searching for new ideas, might find less latitude to ignore Syria down the road.

In addition Christopher Hitchens concludes

In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let's give Baker his due—"on side." The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to "address the root cause" and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the "root causes" of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.

I'll admit that my dislike for James Baker is based on his documented antipathy for Israel. But his record isn''t nearly as successful as his fans would have us believe.

UPDATE II: Even as I bash him and his administration, it is nice to see that ex-President Bush stands up for his son.

Technorati tags: James Baker.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 21, 2006 3:31 AM