"With all the Baker-Hamilton talk about it’s time for the Iraqis to step up and take charge of themselves, it’s obvious this gang of Americans still wants to run somebody else’s country. Whether or not these recommendations are good ideas—and who of us non-Iraqis can even form a sensible opinion about that?—you shouldn’t put such stuff out in a public document unless you intend for the Iraqis and Arabs in general to know that we think they are inept children without the capacity to conduct their own affairs. The all-knowing attitude such pronouncements convey!
"If there were any doubt about the attitude, this recommendation takes care of it: “RECOMMENDATION 67: The President should create a Senior Advisor for Economic Reconstruction in Iraq.” Yes, the little people will need one of them.
"Given the worldwide suspicion concerning our motives for being in Iraq, one can only wonder at what may have been going through the Baker-Hamilton noodle when it penned these sentences: “The United States should encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies …. The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise, in order to enhance efficiency, transparency, and accountability.”
"It is possible that reorganizing the Iraqi oil industry might be a good thing, but in this document? How could the people who signed it have decided this was the moment to privatize Iraqi oil and invite in Western corporate interests unless their purpose was to ensure the opposition of Hugo Chávez and every other left-leaning person on the face of the globe? One can only chalk it up to a kind of cuckoo naïveté.
"If the oil paragraphs were not enough, Baker-Hamilton had to stick in a sentence guaranteed to raise up every pro-Israeli group in the United States against the document. It read: “The only basis on which peace can be achieved is that set forth in UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and in the principle of ‘land for peace.’” Resolutions 242 and 338 call for the Israelis to give back to the Palestinians the territory stolen from them decades ago. Baker-Hamilton cannot have written the sentence oblivious of the rule which holds that while Arab states are bound to obey U.N. resolutions, Israel is not. But this was hardly the moment to stir up that controversy, even though everybody knows there will be no peace for Israel or the U.S. until they disgorge their ill-gotten gains and make nicey-nicey with their neighbors. If we are going to wait upon the Israelis making peace before we depart Iraq, a lot more of our soldiers are going to die.
Found on Antiwar.com
Found on Antiwar.com
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