How many readers of this magazine would find themselves in agreement with Bill Kristol even outside the charitable space of the holiday season?
This is the editor of the Weekly Standard arguing, with his regime change doubles-partner Robert Kagan, against the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendations for Iraq:
It's not as if the Baker commission has accomplished nothing, however. Although its recommendations will have no effect on American policy going forward, they have already had a very damaging effect throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East and in Iraq. For the Iraq Study Group, aided by supportive American media, has successfully conveyed the impression to everyone at home and abroad that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq. This has weakened American allies and strengthened American enemies. It has exacerbated the problems in Iraq, as all the various factions in that country begin to prepare for the "inevitable" American retreat. Now it will require enormous efforts by the president and his advisers to dispel the disastrous impression that the Baker commission has quite deliberately created and will continue to foster in the weeks ahead. At home and abroad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on.
That paragraph precedes one in which Kristol and Kagan pretty contentedly show that whatever the findings of this headline-generating body of "wise men," the president has given every indication that he will not a) play nice with Iran, b) do likewise with Syria. Big mistake, neocon dreaming, the Death of Diplomacy and all that, you say — but here is Ha'aretz contributer Shmuel Rosner in Slate, discussing the one country, historically more amenable to democracy than Iraq, that K&K failed to mention:
Some Lebanese are waiting, somewhat anxiously, for the Baker-Hamilton committee's recommendations this Wednesday. They have zero confidence in the help they might get in the future from an American administration. "If the Syrians help Bush in Iraq, he could sell us out in a second," one of them told me. "Exactly as his father sold out the Kurds to Saddam 15 years ago."
Quite. What price, then, realpolitik, or the coddling of the only remaining Baathist government in the Middle East? (If a rapproachment with Syria is in fact in the works, then this would be not just a replay of the shameful sell-out of the Kurds and Shia in '91, but also reminiscent of the Churchill-Roosevelt concession to Stalin of Poland, whose violated sovereignty formed the basis for Allied intervention in the first place.)
Some principles are worth keeping and reaffirming, even at the cost of "stability." And what are the odds that a Hezbollah-controlled country south of Israel will be anything even remotely resembling stable?