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The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach
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| Editorial Reviews: | | |  | | On March 15, 2006, members from both parties in Congress supported the creation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group to review the situation on the ground and propose strategies for the way forward. For more than eight months, the Study Group met with military officers, regional experts, academics, journalists, and high-level government officials from America and abroad. Participants included George W. Bush and members of his cabinet; Bill Clinton; Jalal Talabani; Nouri Kamal al-Maliki; Generals John Abizaid, George Casey, and Anthony Zinni; Colin Powell; Thomas Friedman; George Packer; and many others. This official edition contains the Group?s findings and proposals for improving security, strengthening the new government, rebuilding the economy and infrastructure, and maintaining stability in the region. It is a highly anticipated and essential step forward for Iraq, America, and the world. | |
| Custom Reviews: | |
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| A good addition to one's reference shelf | |
| | There are some books you just need to have on hand for when somebody screaming on a blog starts misquoting said books. I didn't buy this book to read it cover to cover, but I'm glad I've got it to refer to when needed. You'd be amazed what some people out there are claiming are "recommendations of the Iraq Study Group"! Then, when you look it up, you can correct those bandied about misperceptions (or misinformation) in a hurry. For that kind of information, you can't beat the price!
| | You Break it, You Bought it | |
| | With an economy of words, the book begins: "There is no guarantee for success in Iraq. The situation in Baghdad and several provinces is dire.... There is great suffering and the daily lives of Iraqis show little or no improvement." It then details the problems with security, politics, economics, and international support that transcend a purely military solution to Iraq.
The problems of security begin with the factions of Shiite leaders who do not want to surrender their new-found power and disarm their militias. The Sunni Arabs, long the rulers of Iraq are not ready to abandon their insurgency, al-Qaeda must be progressively pursued and destroyed, and the Kurds are not willing to give up their autonomy.
The politics is equally bleak. The Iraqi government is unable to provide essential services. There is no security for key infrastructure. Corruption is rampant and capacity is inadequate. Their elected representatives "treat ministries as political spoils." The judiciary is also weak and intimidation against them has been ruthless.
With inflation at more than fifty percent and unemployment running from 20-60 percent, Iraq is not ripe for international investment. Oil production has fallen because of a lack of security, investment, and technical expertise. With corruption and negligible security accounting for as much as 500,000 barrels of oil a day being stolen, international support and investment are not likely to occur in the near future.
The Study Group adds seventy-nine recommendations for change in Iraq. First and foremost, it would be wrong for US forces to leave, which has consequences if we do stay, and consequences if we don't. It's the classic lose-lose situation. Unfortunately, the study does not go into any depth how these recommendations are to be accomplished.
Initially, I was skeptical of a board that was co-chaired by James A. Baker III, the virtual Bush family lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court that the all the votes had been recounted when they hadn't been. Seeing the name of Edwin Meese didn't allay my suspicions that this study group might end up throwing soft balls George Bush's way, or would not hold him accountable. On the contrary, they have made it clear that this administration made many mistakes and severely underestimated the situation after it declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
The study group makes it abundantly clear that Iraq is a complex problem that goes far beyond simple-minded phrases of "stay the course," or "we will not leave until victory is achieved."
For anyone wishing to get a thorough and concise description of the complex problems we face in Iraq, this is an excellent compendium.
It's not surprising that George W. Bush rejected the report.
ECP
01.04.08: 1,710 days since major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
P.S. Also recommended:
"The Battle for Peace" by General Anthony Zinni
"Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas E. Ricks
| | Baker Report Would Turn Failed Ideas Into Policy | |
| | As Daniel Pipes expounded upon on the New York Sun, The Iraq Study Group Report, cobbled together by ten individuals lacking specialized knowledge of Iraq, dredges up past failed U.S. policies in the Middle East and would enshrine them as current policy.
Most profoundly, regarding the American role in Iraq, the report moronically splits the difference of troops staying or leaving, without ever examining the basic premise of the U.S. government taking responsibility for the country's minutiae, such as its setting up public works projects. Instead, the report unthinkingly accepts that strategic assumption and only tweaks tactics at the margins.
A preposterously lengthy list of 79 recommendations lies at the heart of the report. These include such gems as bringing in the (Saudi-sponsored) Organization of the Islamic Conference or the Arab League (no. 3) to decide Iraq's future. Another creates an "Iraq International Support Group" that includes Iran, Syria (no. 5), and the United Nations secretary-general (no. 7).
Other brilliant recommendations call for the UN Security Council to handle the Iranian nuclear problem (no. 10) and for the support group to persuade Tehran to "take specific steps to improve the situation in Iraq" (no. 11). Right. The Iranian regime, whose president envisions a "world without America," will save Washington's bacon. Such counsel smacks at best of what the Jerusalem Post calls "staggering naïveté" and at worst of ghastly foolishness.
Of course, small minds assert that problems in Iraq are "inextricably linked" to the Arab-Israeli conflict - thereby repeating the precise mistake that lead co-chairman James A. Baker, III, made in 1991. He then led the effort to abandon the Persian Gulf and turn to the Palestinians, leaving Saddam Hussein in power for another dozen years and contributing directly to the present mess. In the new report, Mr. Baker and his colleagues call for a Palestinian state (no. 12) and even demand that a final settlement address the Palestinian "right of return" (no. 17) - code for dismantling the Jewish state. They peremptorily declare that "the Israelis should return the Golan Heights," in return for a U.S. security guarantee (no. 16).
Besides the astonishing conceit of these Olympian declarations, one wonders how exactly the Iraqi civil war would be ended by pleasing the Palestinian Arabs. Or why the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is any more relevant to Iraq than the unresolved Azeri-Armenian conflict, which is closer to Iraq.
James A. Baker, III, instructs the president how to use the "Iraq Study Group Report."
To make matters worse, Mr. Baker had the nerve to admonish the Bush administration not to treat the report's 79 recommendations "like a fruit salad," choosing one idea while rejecting another, but to accept it as a whole. Even in Washington, a town famous for arrogance, this statement made heads turn. That Mr. Baker and his co-chairman, Lee Hamilton, sat for a picture spread with famed photographer Annie Liebovitz for Men's Vogue, a fashion magazine, only confirms the vacuity of their effort, as does their hiring the giant public relations firm, Edelman.
In all, the Iraq Study Group Report offers a unique combination of bureaucratic caution, false bi-partisanship, trite analysis, and conventional bromides.
Although the press reacted to this drivel, in the words of Daniel Henninger writing in the Wall Street Journal, with "neurotic glee," Robert Kagan and William Kristol deemed it "dead on arrival," and Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, called it "dead in the water." One hopes they are right, that President George W. Bush ignores its recommendations, and that this "new lipstick on a very old pig" (Spencer Ackerman) quickly disappears from sight.
That's not to say that Mr. Bush should "stay the course," for that course has not worked. A host of creative ideas have been floated by individuals knowledgeable about Iraq, sympathetic to the administration's goal of building a free, democratic, and prosperous Iraq, and not tempted to see their role as an exercise in preening. The White House should call on these talented individuals to brainstorm, argue, and emerge with some useful ideas about the future American role in Iraq.
Doing so means breaking with a presidential tradition, going back at least to 1919, of what I call a "know-nothing" Middle East diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson appointed two completely unqualified Americans to head a commission of inquiry to the Levant on the grounds, an aide explained, that Wilson "felt these two men were particularly qualified to go to Syria because they knew nothing about it." This know-nothing approach failed America 87 years ago and it failed again now.
| | | The book The Iraq Study Group Report investigated the problem within Iraq, in regargs to the ensuing militant insurgency and ongoing civil war that we have sometimes seen on the television news in our home countries around the world. Sometimes from these pictures it is hard to view the whole picture which is the Iraqi dilemma of which the US and her allies though fewer in number are still trying to deal with, without further enflaming the racial fundamentalist any further, who from this conflict in Iraq have inspired a coming generations of radical fundamentalist to Al Qaeda radical Fundamentalist Global empire of Usama bin Laden's.
This book analysis of the problem we face and the ideas and method that we can use to destroy this Fundamentalist GLobal network of so called jihadist will only continue if these recommendations are not adapted in Iraq, but also in the wider global context of the worldwide global threat we are facing right at this moment.
I can strongly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in countering the current fundamentalist jihadi global War we are deeply now engaged in.
| | The most vague guidance... | |
| | Of all the things I have read that relate to the Iraq War this has to be the worse of them all. The book is the most vague and inconclusive guidance I have read so far. It was obviously written by politicians rather than regional experts or middle east scholars so it lacks the substance it needs.
El Marques.
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