New Realism, just like the Old Realism

Most in Washington seem to be waiting with bated breath for the Baker/Hamilton Study Group to pull a rabbit out of a hat in terms of options for Iraq. Not everyone is so willing to defer to their opinions.

There has been some tough criticism from Victor Hanson (on the Right) and Michael Kinsley (on the Left) about leaving it up to the old guard to solve current problems.

Hanson (who was just on campus last month) is cynical about an old dog and new tricks:

Next will come the Baker group report on Iraq— no doubt with more calls to reassure regional dictatorships and to ask them to help stabilize” Iraq, as if such creepy strongmen would find anything to their advantage in having a successful democracy next door.

And we should remember a few things about the return of “realism which is really just an academic veneer to the old isolationism. This was a policy that gave us the arming of Osama bin Laden et. al. to stop the Soviets in Afghanistan, sort of played Iraq off against Iran in their murderous war of the 1980s, abandoned the Kurds, favored the Soviet Gorbachev over the Russian Yeltsin, stopped outside Baghdad and let the Shiites and Kurds be gunned down after urging them to revolt, let Milosevic do his murdering unopposed, and established a revolving door in the Middle East in which former American officials simply went out of office and into great profit by using their past contacts to be rewarded with legal, financial, and arms links to petro-dollar rich dictatorships ...

Kinsley wonders why are we so interested in listening to James Baker anyway?

If we had wanted our country to be run by James Baker, we had our chance. He was interested in running for president in 1996 but discovered that his interest in a James Baker presidency was not widely shared. . . . People like Baker always favor a bipartisan consensus.

They don't really believe in politics, which is to say they don't really believe in democracy.

and he notes that commisions are used in two basic ways:

Sometimes a problem is referred to a prestigious commission so that the commission can recommend doing things that everybody knows must be done but that nobody has the nerve to propose -- at least nobody who has to run for office.

or

On the other hand, sometimes a problem is referred to a commission simply to get it off the table. Action is widely perceived as necessary, and the creation of a commission can be made to look like action.

It looks like this one might be used for both.

Depressing.