Note: This is the first of a three-part series
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Noted historian Eric Foner in a December 7 article on OpEd News.com calls George Bush "the worst president in US history....(who) in his first six years in office....managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors." Equally noted historian Gabriel Kolko agrees, and along with his other comments, calls the Bush administration "the worst set of incompetents ever to hold power in Washington." And referring specifically to the war in Iraq, Kolko colorfully describes what former Reagan administration National Security Agency (NSA) chief General William Odom calls "....the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States" by saying the Bush administration "shocked and awed....itself." Hard to say it better than that.

Enter James Baker and the Iraq Study Group (ISG) that reported its findings publicly on December 6 after most of it was leaked well in advance making its release and full-court corporate media press hyping and griping anti-climactic as well as disappointing and disturbing. The ISG was formed in March with at least four crucial aims:

--to avoid a perceived inevitable political and fiscal train wreck caused by the disastrous Bush administration policy over the past six years.

-- to buy time for the failed and discredited Bush administration attempting to save it along with the family's name and reputation.

-- to devise a scheme to assure US dominance in the Middle East, fast slipping away, is restored and maintained going forward so this country doesn't lose control over what a State Department spokesperson in 1945 called a "stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history -(the region's oil)."

-- to be a (thinly-veiled) attempt to assuage public anger over a war gone sour, that's illegal, can't be won, is taking a terrible toll, and never should have been waged.

The ISG did it by proposing 79 recommendations supposedly comprising a change of course strategy that, in fact, amounts to little more than moving the existing chess pieces around the Iraq board, ending up almost where we are now - in a hopeless unresolvable quagmire approaching an apocalypse with no possibility of winning an unwinnable war and no high-level policy-makers thinking we can save for a president mired in a state of denial.

He's out of touch with reality, and according to Capitol Hill Blue editor Doug Thompson from insider reports he's getting calling the president "a dangerous cornered animal" he writes: Bush is a man "living on the edge" growing "more sullen and moody with each passing day....his paranoia....increasing to manic levels as he launches into tirades about traitors in his own party, in the press and among his allies (and) feels betrayed by....James Baker (whose ISG report he feels humiliated his administration)." The president, hasn't a clue that Jim Baker didn't do this. George Bush did a very thorough job of it himself.

What the ISG Should Have Addressed but Didn't

That said and well reported, what's most striking about the ISG report isn't what it says but what it leaves out. Beginning in 1991, the US conducted an unending war of aggression in two phases, with a dozen years of punishing and unjustifiable sanctions sandwiched between them, against a country posing no threat to us or its neighbors following its long and costly war in the 1980s with Iran (that the US urged Saddam to wage and supported him throughout) from which it needed financial help to recover but hadn't gotten enough to make a significant difference. It began after Saddam misread US intentions regarding his troubled relations with Kuwait, allowing himself to be deceived by the first Bush administration into believing we had no interest in how he chose to settle his justifiable dispute which Washington had a hand in creating.

With US urging, Kuwait demanded repayment of $14 billion in outstanding loans incurred to help finance Saddam's war with Iran, it also helped keep oil prices low when Iraq needed them higher to oblige, and it was slant drilling into Iraqi territory and provokingly refusing to negotiate a reasonable settlement to all disputes. Finally, Iraq took matters into its own hands to do by invasion what it couldn't achieve through months of failed diplomacy but only with de facto US approval it thought it got that proved not to be.

Saddam fell into the trap, and the rest is history. He's now still in the dock after one conviction, was sentenced to be hanged by the US-administered kangaroo court after the first of his trials, his country is occupied and in ruins, and his people are living in a state of out-of-control violence and desparation because of an illegal and brutal occupation that must end unconditionally for them to have any hope for a normal life again.

The ISG report ignores this history and the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. It began with Saddam's misguided invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990 with the US then claiming it would liberate the country forcibly even though he was willing to negotiate a settlement and pull out his forces. But once the trap was baited with Saddam in it, there was no turning back from a war the US wanted. Events were unstoppable which was clear from GHW Bush's belligerent language saying "(Saddam's) Naked aggression will not stand" and refusing all his overtures to negotiate and his willingness to remove his occupying forces wanting only reasonable redress.

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GWH Bush got the war he wanted, but the US plan wasn't to liberate Kuwait. It was to remove or fatally weaken a leader we couldn't dominate and liberate his nation's oil and sovereignty from his control to ours. It was also a way to accomplish what GHW Bush said at war's end six weeks after it began on January 17, 1991: "It's a proud day for America - and, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all," but he failed to explain what he meant was this now gave the US license to attack and invade another country any time henceforth it could convince the public a threat existed to justify it. Given the power and complicity of the corporate-controlled media, that hasn't been a problem since.

So faced with the syndrome's resurgence from the disaster today in Iraq, the ISG is waging a frontal attack to contain it deceiving the public to believe a new course is at hand hoping to assuage its anger so essentially the same failed policy can continue unabated. It's also to buy enough time for George Bush to get through the next two years, hold together his failed administration slowly coming apart for lack of public support, and keep the ship of state from being wrecked on the shoals of the administration's ineptness and arrogance extreme enough for a growing number of former adherents to walk away not wanting the taint of it to tarnish them any more than it already has.

It doesn't matter what was proposed on December 6 or that there's no chance it can work any better than current policy. That's for the next administration in 2009 to worry about. What does matter is to convince the public it's a new course, even though it's only smoke and mirrors, and one sensible enough to work that will end the US occupation and involvement in the country but at an unspecified time left unstated because there is none or any intention to leave the country or give up control of its oil treasure. Just like in the run-up to the March, 2003 attack and invasion, the public again has been had, and it remains to be seen how long it will take for it to catch on and continue opposing an illegal war of aggression that never should have been waged in the first place.

Other Omissions in the ISG Report

Start with its members and the interests they represent. Overall it's an assemblage of high-level elitists from past government service working with their counterparts in the military and ideologically-driven right wing think tank experts brought together to find a way to assure the US imperial agenda stays on track meaning despite what its report said, the US is in Iraq to stay as long as there's enough oil in the region to make it worthwhile as that's why we came in the first place along with neutering Saddam to remove Israel's main obstacle to its regional hegemony.

Jim Baker led the group along with his co-chair and leading figure of the 9/11 commission whitewash, former Democrat congressman Lee Hamilton, who's another long-standing loyal servant of empire and serial abuser of the public trust. They and the others on the Commission share another dubious attribute. Like George Bush and his administration co-conspirators, these figures, too, are war criminals along with their other abuses of the public trust that should have put them in the dock of justice and made them be held to account along with George Bush, Dick Cheney and their band of neocon rogues. They never will be in a nation ruled by victor's justice meaning none at all for the law-breakers and a whole lot of injustice for its victims.

Jim Baker's association with crime and scandal is long-standing, but he's always emerged unscatched, his reputation, in fact, enhanced, with each new episode of lawlessness he's played a central role in while navigating safely through each of them. He's done it almost without breaking a sweat in his role as a man at the center of power since the inception of the Reagan administration in 1980. Outside the Bush family, no one is closer or more important to the president's father and former president than Baker. And no one has more influence with him or with other major players in the nation's power establishment, at least on the dominant Republican side. It's why, along with others of his status, he's able to get away with murder and most anything else.

From 1985 - 1988, he was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Treasury after serving as the president's influential White House Chief of Staff from inception (as part of the Baker, Ed Meese, Michael Deaver power troika) till he took over the treasury post. While there, he, more than anyone else (but with a lot of co-conspiratorial help), bore responsibility for the grand theft of over $100 billion in the notorious Savings and Loan scandal that allowed the looting of deregulated banks to take place throughout the country, especially in his home state of Texas where anything goes as long as there's a buck in it for the power elite. He then served as GHW Bush's Secretary of State from 1989 - 1992 playing a major role in crafting administration policy leading to the Gulf war and the unjustifiable sanctions of aggression at its conclusion.

Baker formed his own think tank in 1993 after leaving the Bush administration, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Houston, where the former president happens to live when he's not at his summer home in Maine. It supports "oil and petrodollar conquest" policies, played a major role in post 9/11 policy and the fraudulent "war on terror" making it possible, and is also a prominent attorney connected with the notorious Carlyle Group that's profited enormously from all things connected to the defense establishment and uses the services of GHW Bush in the role of "senior consultant" and master rainmaker/fixer-arranger at a very high price for his services.

Baker also engineered the theft of the 2000 presidential election for the younger Bush by assuring he got the necessary 25 Florida electoral votes and not Al Gore who won them and the presidency he never got because George Bush was chosen for the role regardless of the will of the electorate. Five complicit US Supreme Court justices went along with the scheme to seal the deal and in so doing abrogated their constitutional duty to uphold the law of the land. One of them was commission member Sandra Day O'Connor, now rewarded for her participation in the infamous judicial coup d'etat giving her an encore performance as legal advisor and expert law twister/subverter for the interests of wealth and power she swears allegiance to like all the other members of the "Gang of Ten" co-conspirators.

Baker is their leader and is presented as an respected diplomat and elder statesman sent to rescue the ship of state and Bush administration to keep it afloat and him in the White House at least for another two years. What he is, in fact, is a master criminal/manipulator/schemer, a dangerous and ruthless power broker deserving no public trust who should be made to answer for his malfeasance according to the law he doesn't respect or acknowledge unless he can twist it to serve his interests or those of his clients.

Read Part 2, "Trashing International Law" on Wednesday, December 20th.

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Stephen Lendman [send him email] lives in Chicago, and maintains a blog at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com