Neo-Cons Move to Preempt Baker Report
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the neo-conservative press here over the past month, one would think that former Secretary of State James Baker poses the biggest threat to the United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein.
Things got even more personal with columns by Frank Gaffney, president of the neo-conservative Centre for Security Policy, and Mark Steyn in the Washington Times suggesting that Baker's thinking was motivated as much by anti-Semitism as by realism.
"Jim Baker's hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the region," wrote Gaffney, suggesting that the ISG -- which, in another column published Tuesday, he called the "Iraq Surrender Group" -- would recommend a regional approach similar to Madrid that would "throw free Iraq to the wolves" and "allow the Mideast's only bona fide democracy, the Jewish State, to be snuffed in due course."
For sheer consistency, however, the Weekly Standard, which in this week's edition featured no less than three articles denouncing the ISG -- including one that described the Commission's membership as "deeply reactionary" and the "K-Mart version of the Congress of Vienna -- has led the field.
In successive lead editorials by chief editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the magazine first assailed the notion that Washington should engage Syria and Iran as "capitulation," and then, reassured by Bush's declaration last week that he was not prepared to follow the ISG's advice on talking with either Damascus or Tehran, accused Baker of having "quite deliberately created... the disastrous impression... that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq."
"At home and broad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on. Happily, that is not the case," according to Kagan and Kristol, who recently called Bush "the last neocon in power"... http://tinyurl.com/yasujx [Open in new window]
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Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 (IPS) - To have read the neo-conservative press here over the past month, one would think that former Secretary of State James Baker poses the biggest threat to the United States and Israel since Saddam Hussein.
Things got even more personal with columns by Frank Gaffney, president of the neo-conservative Centre for Security Policy, and Mark Steyn in the Washington Times suggesting that Baker's thinking was motivated as much by anti-Semitism as by realism.
"Jim Baker's hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel's foes in the region," wrote Gaffney, suggesting that the ISG -- which, in another column published Tuesday, he called the "Iraq Surrender Group" -- would recommend a regional approach similar to Madrid that would "throw free Iraq to the wolves" and "allow the Mideast's only bona fide democracy, the Jewish State, to be snuffed in due course."
For sheer consistency, however, the Weekly Standard, which in this week's edition featured no less than three articles denouncing the ISG -- including one that described the Commission's membership as "deeply reactionary" and the "K-Mart version of the Congress of Vienna -- has led the field.
In successive lead editorials by chief editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the magazine first assailed the notion that Washington should engage Syria and Iran as "capitulation," and then, reassured by Bush's declaration last week that he was not prepared to follow the ISG's advice on talking with either Damascus or Tehran, accused Baker of having "quite deliberately created... the disastrous impression... that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq."
"At home and broad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on. Happily, that is not the case," according to Kagan and Kristol, who recently called Bush "the last neocon in power"... http://tinyurl.com/yasujx [Open in new window]
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posted by Dan at 8:10 AM
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