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Baker to Baghdad?Bush finally admits that the occupation is going badly.

By Fred KaplanUpdated Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 4:26 PM ET

Click here for a July 29 update.

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Two recent signs suggest not only that postwar Iraq is going badly but that top Bush officials, finally, know it's going badly.

The first sign came last week in a little-noticed article in Stars and Stripes, reporting that the 3^rd Infantry Division will no longer accommodate embedded reporters—or, with few exceptions, reporters period.

Embedding was a brilliant PR gesture, designed to weave a bond of intimacy and dependency between war reporters and war fighters, but it could remain brilliant only as long as there was a good story to tell. All through Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was a good story indeed, and the embeds beamed it far, wide, and enthusiastically. (Remember CNN's Walter Rodgers, embedded with the 3^rd I.D.'s 7^th Cavalry, breathlessly telling viewers how "we" broke through the defenses and took the bridge?)

Now, however, the story has turned sour, to the point where two soldiers with the 3^rd I.D., who had grown all too accustomed to talking freely with the press, publicly lambasted not just the brass but the political bosses—on network television, faces exposed, names on the record—in startlingly stark language. One of the soldiers told ABC News, "If Donald Rumsfeld was here, I'd ask him for his resignation." The other said, "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list. … The Aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz."

After that exhibition, the spokesman for the 3^rd Infantry issued a statement that the unit was "no longer embedding media for short stays, effective the beginning of this week." The unit's commander, Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, went further, deciding, as Stars and Stripes put it, "to stop letting reporters spend time with troops, except to gather information for pre-approved 'news features.' "

It is unclear whether this was Blount's decision or the Pentagon's. However, since embedding was a Rumsfeld initiative (specifically, conceived by his then-assistant secretary for public affairs, Victoria Clarke), its termination almost certainly could not have been ordered without the permission of Rumsfeld or his aides. And if someone so high up has decided that the image of the mission would now do better without embeds trailing along, that means they know the era of casually good stories is over.

The second, and more intriguing, sign was the news over the weekend that President Bush is asking James Baker, his father's old secretary of State, to go to Baghdad and help supervise Iraqi reconstruction. It is not known whether Baker will take the job—at this point, it's a little murky how definitively Bush made the offer—but, however it turns out, the story is quite stunning in at least two ways.

First, Baker is 73, living comfortably, and widely respected both as a diplomat and as a political operator (on the latter point, he could claim much credit for pulling Bush out of the Florida fires and thus helping install him in the White House). In other words, if Baker took this job—and Bush must have known this before thinking about offering it to him—it would not be as an underling to Paul Bremer, the current U.S. administrator, or even as someone who reports, as Bremer does, to Rumsfeld. He would take it only as (de facto, if not de jure) the man in charge.

Bremer, it might be recalled, was in Washington late last week, conferring with Bush, holding court with Rumsfeld before the Pentagon press corps, and chatting on the talk shows. At all these appearances (at least the ones in public), he kept up a smooth stream of optimism about progress in Iraq—at the same time that Bush was thinking of replacing or demoting him. This confluence does not bespeak great confidence.

The second interesting thing about Baker is that he is, and always has been, deeply opposed to the unilateralist views that currently dominate the Pentagon and the White House. Last August, Baker wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, urging the president not to "go it alone" in confronting Iraq and to "reject the advice of those who counsel doing so." (Shortly after that piece—which was widely viewed as having been inspired, or at least approved, by Bush's father—the president did indeed take his case to the United Nations.) Just last April, at a speech before Toronto's corporate elite at the Empire Club of Canada, Baker talked of mending U.S. relations with the traditional allies and working more again with the United Nations.

The fact that Baker is being considered for the job might indicate that Bush finally realizes he can't secure and rebuild Iraq on his own, that allies are necessary. And who better to get those allies onboard than Baker, who got them onboard before?

And so we might soon see a great battle on the Potomac, a rematch of last year's grueling duel of Powell and the diplomats vs. Rumsfeld and the neo-cons. Only this time, with a Bush-backed Baker tipping the scales, the diplomats could win.

Update, July 29, 2003: Today, the Post is reporting that Baker will not be offered the job after all, and that the current bureaucratic arrangement—which has Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, serving under and reporting to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—will remain in place, unaltered.

It is not entirely clear what this intriguing sequence of leaks and counter-leaks has signified. But it looks as if the diplomatic wing of the Bush administration (those who believe, like Baker, that the United States must mend its ties to the allies) attempted an end-run around the unilateralist neocons who currently dominate policy-making—and got crushed in the process.

Examine the wording of the Post's lead: Baker, it says, "will not join the Iraq reconstruction effort, as some administration officials had hoped." (Italics added.)

Keeping in mind this guidepost—the signal that the entire story is about internecine conflict—it becomes clear how to fill in the blanks, or decode the euphemisms, of the following passage, from later in the piece: "[W]hen the idea of reaching out to Baker was made public [i.e., when it appeared in the Post], it quickly became clear that it would be seen as undermining Bremer [i.e., undermining Bremer's boss, Rumsfeld] and any such notion was discarded [i.e., was beaten back severely]."

And so, let me revise my own lead from this article: Postwar Iraq is going badly, but it's not yet clear that Bush knows it—or is doing anything about it.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The Baker trial balloon was a fact. Who sent it up, who shot it down, and why, remain mysteries. Fred Kaplan's theory is that it was sent up by anti-neoconservatives in the White House and State Department because everything in Iraq is a disaster. Veteran Kaplan-watchers will note that "everything is a disaster" is one of his recurring themes … Nonetheless, his description of the problem the Bush White House faces is confident enough, resting on the assumption that what most concerns him most concerns the administration. What concerns Kaplan is casualties and grumbling among the troops, but what most concerns the White House, according to the Post and other sources, appears to be Paul Bremer's insistence that much more money will be needed for Iraqi administration and reconstruction than the administration had expected. This impression is reinforced by Baker having entered the picture. The responsibilities that the Post's revised story suggested might be his -- negotiating Iraq's foreign debt and the terms of other nation's contributing to the costs of reconstructing Iraq -- are not the kind of things that Bremer could necessarily handle from Baghdad. If anything they fall more in Colin Powell's field of responsibility than in Bremer's. As far as the security situation is concerned, Jim Baker could do no more to improve that than I could. So what was this all about? … This is my guess: the White House reacted strongly against the message Bremer conveyed to Bush, Rice and Powell that occupation and reconstruction would cost much more than Bush had expected it to. Seeking a way to rein in Bremer, the White House fell in with a suggestion that Baker was the man to do it … but without a clear idea of how exactly this would be done. Following objections from the Defense Department, to whom Bremer reports, the White House sources for the Post's original story changed their tune somewhat, by suggesting to the Post responsibilities for Baker that would help the situation in Iraq but without undercutting Bremer personally. My guess, though, is that they did this without informing Powell, who then objected to the Post's revised description of Baker's revised role as undercutting him. And who finally let the air out of the trial balloon? Baker did. He does not need this or any job, and doesn't see any reason he should serve as a ping-pong ball bounced between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon either…

--Zathras

(To reply, click here)

… The recent series of flips and flops over who'll be running postwar Iraq is fascinating on a number of levels. What interests me the most, though, is how incredibly isolated this Administration is becoming. The world community hates them. The Republican Congress is investigating them. Significant portions of the intelligence community and the armed services seem to hate them. . . and the flap between the "outs" in the State Department (their own State Department, it bears mentioning) and the "ins" in Defense has now reached such epic proportions that respected elder statesmen of the GOP are starting to intervene. . . . against the President's faction! Exactly what the hell is going on here? Pop psychology might suggest that near-universal opposition is only making the Administration hawks cling to their position more tenaciously. They've always discounted opposing views, believing that their point of view is the absolute truth and anyone who dares disagree with them is either deluded, deceitful, or blind. I don't know if that's the case. . . but they've climbed far, far out on a very thin limb. And they're running out of friends and allies fast.

--Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here)

(7/30)

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