Hitchens on the return of James Baker

The messiah delivered his plan for Iraq today in Chicago. It’s time to let the Shiites take the gloves off “give Iraqis their country back,” he says, so a pullout “phased redeployment” should commence within the next four to six months. The Carl Levin plan, in other words. Cut and jog.

He also framed the Democrats’ victory as a call for “realism” in Iraq, which brings us to Hitch and the depressing vogue in which Kissingerian Bush bagman James Baker presently finds himself. The awful bottom line:

In 1991, for those who keep insisting on the importance of sending enough troops, there were half a million already-triumphant Allied soldiers on the scene. Iraq was stuffed with weapons of mass destruction, just waiting to be discovered by the inspectors of UNSCOM. The mass graves were fresh. The strength of sectarian militias was slight. The influence of Iran, still recovering from the devastating aggression of Saddam Hussein, was limited. Syria was—let’s give Baker his due—”on side.” The Iraqi Baathists were demoralized by the sheer speed and ignominy of their eviction from Kuwait and completely isolated even from their usual protectors in Moscow, Paris, and Beijing. There would never have been a better opportunity to “address the root cause” and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the “root causes” of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.

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