Feeling heat from Republican incumbents facing retirement from Congress in three weeks, the Bush administration has decided to present the nominal government in Baghdad with a "timetable"--of sorts. "Stand up by this date or maybe we'll stand down." All of the relevant dates, naturally, will not be finalized until after the second Tuesday in November but before the next Congress convenes in January. With all the cynicism of Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War, James Baker III gives the loyalists a last-minute talking point and in the same gesture hands the proverbially unwelcome punchbowl ornament to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker-apparent of the House of Representatives. Robert Dreyfuss cautioned last month that
as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work.... "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008....
If--and it's a very big if--Baker can forge a consensus plan on what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee--whoever he (or she) is--will have a hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans....
Baker said that to do something before the November 2006 elections would inevitably politicize the report, something that Baker desperately wants to avoid [sic].
A timetable for victory! Stay the (corrected) course! Not fast enough? Make Mr. Baker's day, Speaker Pelosi: cut and run (faster)!
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