MB Civic

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12746550/that_iraq_report_more_of_the_same/print

Highly recommend to go read the whole thing – here are some of the best parts…

What a fiasco this whole Baker-Hamilton episode is, with all its attendant leaks and media manipulations — a veritable symphony of Typical Washington Bullshit. It has all the hallmarks of the pusillanimous, cover-your-ass mentality that rules our nation’s capital, where all problems are political problems and actual real emergencies never make it to the desk of anyone who matters…

Baker-Hamilton from the very start was a classic bullshit-cloud in the proud tradition of those damnable congressional “studies” we hear about from time to time, in which “bipartisan panels” are convened to much fanfare and packed off to the wilds of suburban Virginia for years of intellectually masturbatory activity — the usual solution, whenever House or Senate leaders are faced with a genuinely thorny political issue that offers no easy or obvious solutions, i.e. a problem that can’t be simply blamed on one or the other political party, but which needs actual fixing.

Whenever one of those issues pops up, Washington politicians generally find themselves at a loss. They don’t know what to do. For the vast majority of these buffoons, their expertise lies elsewhere. These guys know how to spread their legs for campaign contributors, raid the budget for redundant public works projects and worm their way onto the six o’clock news wearing a hardhat or a Cubs cap — but the average elected official knows very little about actually solving real political problems, because in most cases that’s not what got him elected…

..Both the legislative and the executive branch are mainly engaged in searching out and finding the acceptable mean between voter sentiment and financial interest. It’s sort of an ongoing math problem — figuring out how many voters you can afford to fuck every four years, or how much money you should be extracting, and from which sponsors, for each rape of your constituents.

…And so, when faced with an unsolvable or seemingly unsolvable political conundrum, most politicians feel there’s only one thing to do. You appear onstage with your rival party’s leader, embrace him, announce that you’re going to find a “bipartisan” solution together, and then nominate a panel of rotting political corpses who will spend 18 months, a few dozen million dollars, many thousands of taxpayer-funded air miles, and about 130,000 pages of impossibly verbose text finding a way for both parties to successfully take the fork in the road and blow off the entire issue, whatever it was…

…It’s important, when you nominate your panel, to dig up the oldest, saggiest, rubberiest, most used-up political whores on the Eastern seaboard to take up your cause. That way, you can be sure that the panel will know its place and not address any extraneous issues in its inquiry — like, for instance, whose fault a certain war is, or whether the whole idea of a “War on Terrorism” needs to be rethought, or whether the idea of preemptive defense as a general strategy is viable at all, or whether previously unthinkable solutions may now have to be countenanced, or whether there is anyone currently in a position of responsibility who perhaps should immediately be removed from office and hung by his balls…

…Baker-Hamilton was a classic whore-panel in every sense. None were Middle East experts. None had logged serious time in Iraq, before or after the invasion. All of them had influential friends on both sides of the aisle all over Washington, parties in the future they wanted to keep getting invites to, ambitions yet to be realized. You could assign Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, Sandra Day O’Connor and Vernon Jordan, Jr. to take on virtually any problem and feel very confident that between the four of them, they would find a way to avoid the ugly heart of any serious political dilemma…

…In the midst of all of the recent fanfare about Baker-Hamilton, some of the actual actors in the Iraq disaster have been using the media to similarly absolve themselves of any responsibility to act. We started to see this happening on November 15, when Michael Gordon of The New York Times (who seems to be spending a lot of time fellating intelligence officials lately) ran a ponderous “news analysis” suggesting that a rapid withdrawal might not be the best idea (“Get Out Now? Not So Fast, Some Experts Say,” Nov. 15). In this piece, a host of military and intelligence officials argued vociferously that America’s problems in Iraq stemmed from not having enough troops, and that an early withdrawal would accelerate the country’s decline into civil war. Among the voices quoted in Gordon’s piece is former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, who as Jeff Cohen noted was one of the chief pom-pom wavers for the war before the invasion and one of the many experts who insisted that Iraq possessed WMDs. Gordon conveniently left Pollack’s record on that score out of the article…

Baker-Hamilton wasn’t about finding solutions to the Iraq problem. It was about finding viable political solutions to the Iraq problem. Since there are none, it punted the problem to the next administration. Maybe the war will be real to those folks and they’ll actually do something. Don’t hold your breath.

Amen.