From The Khaleej Times
By Paul Kennedy

Ever since the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, the debate among American politicians and the public intellectuals who advise them on foreign affairs has had a weird, surreal quality to it. By “surreal,” I simply mean the pursuit of policies that are increasingly divorced from international realities, as if their proponents had entered into a mental world of their own.

Take, for example, the neo-conservatives’ response to the recent, sobering report of the Iraq Study Group, chaired in bipartisan fashion by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. This report made it abundantly clear that the current Iraq strategy isn’t working. Conditions on the ground are worsening. An Iraqi civil war is under way. Without suggesting an immediate “cut and run” policy, the Baker-Hamilton report clearly favours a policy of calibrated disengagement.

One might have thought this report would have been welcomed by all those policymakers and armchair strategists who got us into the war to begin with. Yet after a brief period of subdued mutterings, the American hawks have come back, with their favourite daily, The Wall Street Journal, leading the charge; in fact, the very day after the study group’s meeting with President Bush, the Journal’s lead editorial was titled “The Iraq Muddle Group.”

The Baker-Hamilton report is a fudged job, the arch-interventionists say; it is the work of politicians born to compromise. There should be no appeasement, no retreat, no surrender. Since this is a fight to the death, the only thing to do is “stay the course,” with, if necessary, a further surge of troop reinforcements. And indeed, since these are the sentiments President Bush himself shares, it is no surprise that he announced a “new” strategy of sending around 20,000 more troops to Iraq, essentially rejecting the Baker-Hamilton recommendations.

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