America's occupational hazards

Though a great many of its recommendations had been leaked to the press days earlier, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report to the White House, released on Wednesday, was nevertheless much anticipated. It was seen as an opportunity for the administration to bring about dramatic changes both in its policies in Iraq and in the entire region as a whole.

Critics of the war, whether in Congress or in the bitter national debate, however, were quick to discover that the administration was not about to see the report as a watershed moment for a transformation in US foreign policy. White House spokesmen repeatedly intoned that the commission's recommendations will be "just one voice" to which the president will listen.

Meaningful change, in other words, is not imminent, there is no magic bullet here, and the commander-in-chief will not, in effect, be swayed from his fantasies about "staying the course". The 142-page congressionally chartered report, as a cursory reading of it, hot off the presses, revealed, rested essentially on three legs of a tripod of recommendations: Pursue a concerted effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute, as a way to reduce the broader regional tensions; convince Iraqi leaders to meet specific benchmarks to "improve security in the country", at pain of facing a reduction in US economic and military support, and aim to withdraw nearly all American combat units by early 2008, save for some troops left behind to advise and train Iraqi forces; and (Oh, the horror, the horror!) make diplomatic approaches to Iran and Syria with the goal of holding a regional conference, bringing together all Iraq's neighbours as a way of ending the violence.

The Baker-Hamilton report, as the Iraq Study Group review came to be known following its release to the public in book form, is now billed as "the way forward". Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican, Nebraska, a Vietnam vet whose views on American foreign policy are highly respected in Congress, and whose early warnings about going to war have been shown to be prescient, said: "The president has an opportunity to seize this moment and build a bipartisan foundation to address the deep, deep divisions over Iraq in this country. This presents an exit strategy for the president, for all of us."

But that's not the way President George W. Bush sees it. To him the report is is one idea among many. In recent weeks, as it became apparent what the panel of the 10 commission members (nine men and one woman, five from each party) would recommend, he began to distance himself from it, sponsoring parallel internal reviews, essentially to prevent the ISG from becoming the sole arbiter of a course of action in the Middle East he would be compelled to accept.

"It's very hard for me to, you know, prejudice one report over another," he said in an interview on Monday. "They are all important." There is no question about the fact that American foreign policy in the Middle East, a policy which this administration has made perform tasks of increasing tawdriness, has failed. Here are a couple of examples: Long after the toppling of Saddam Hussain, a venal dictator and a true villain whose overthrow became the casus belli for war in Iraq (after those putative weapons of mass destruction were shown to be a phantom), Fallujah, the City of Mosques, was pulverised by two Marine assaults, and Lebanese farmers in the south continue to this day to be killed or maimed by the million cluster bomblets dropped by Israeli jets less than 48 hours before the war ended last summer, a war the US blatantly championed with the expectation that the military forces of its Zionist ally would finish off Hezbollah once and for all.

Clearly, not the smartest way to go about making friends and influencing people, let alone "introduce" them to democracy.

As to how this policy, beginning, say, with the war in Iraq almost four years ago, became policy, is a mystery. One balks at the idea that professional policy makers experienced, informed, intellectually tuned in policy makers could be behind such monumental mistakes, evincing such a flair for delusional rhetoric ("they will throw flowers at us"), self-justification and shop-worn cliches. Hopefully, the pressure on Bush from Congress, and beyond, to heed the recommendations of the ISG will be acute enough to convince him that "staying the course" in the Middle East is not an option. Rather, changing it is.

As Jim Baker himself said about the US, following the release of his panel's report: "Our ship has hit rough waters, and it must now chart a new way forward." That is what a courageous Big Power, whose ideal role is to project a vitalising moral poise in the world, would do once it realises it has erred.

- Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including 'The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile'. He lives in Washington D.C.