Josh Marshall had an interesting story yesterday evening. (Calpundit noted it too.)
It seems that the White House had decided, according to the Washington Post website, to put James Baker, the former Secretary of State under his dad and the fixer who coordinated the Republican response to the Florida recount (and a senior consultant to the Carlyle Group) in charge in Iraq.
Now, this would have been a pretty big story anyway, because Mr. Baker, who is very close to the Saudi government and not a great fan of Israel by all accounts ("Fuck the jews. They don't vote for us anyway") also has a history with Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle from way back during the first Gulf War.
Shortly after the original story went up, the Post took it down and posted a new one.
There are links to both stories at Uggabugga.)
There's a third story up now which says that "Bush aides" are floating Baker, but "senior White House officials" disclaim any interest in sending Baker. Now they just want to send "a Baker-like figure."
To shed some light on the probable internal - erm - debate involved in this little kerfuffle, it helps to understand about Team B.
In the waning days of the Ford administration, the C.I.A. (director: George H.W. Bush) sought to appease the hard-liners by commissioning ''Team B,'' a group of kibitzers with license to second-guess the intelligence reports on the Soviet Union. Wolfowitz was one of the 10 members. The report they produced was more than Bush bargained for.It painted the Soviet Union as an expansionist boogeyman. In hindsight, much of the Team B report was worst-case hyperbole; it credited the SovietUnion with developing superweapons it never had and ignored the handicaps of a failing Soviet economy. But Team B became a political bludgeon to batter the proponents of arms control and drive up American military spending. Wolfowitz, who contributed a thoughtful and unhysterical chapter on the importance of intermediate-range missiles to the Soviet strategy, says he never bought Team B's alarmist contention that the Soviet Union believed it could fight and win a nuclear war. But he says the report was a useful guerrilla attack on conventional thinking, including the tendency of intelligence agencies to assume that rival countries think the same way we do.
This was not, however, the end of Team B.
The Team B doctrine was crafted in more careful detail in 1992 in a controversial draft of the Defense Department's "Defense Planning Guidance," by Wolfowitz and his deputy, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, currently the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was then Wolfowitz and Libby's boss as defense secretary. The draft, leaked to the media, noted "the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S." and stated, "The United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated." Rejecting the old theory of containment, the draft said that "we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted." If other nations didn't step up, "the United States should be postured to act independently."
The report was to be officially issued by Cheney in early March 1992. But Team A prevented that; a couple days after this report was leaked the White House of Bush 41 began a campaign to disavow it. The then-president's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger all let it be known that they disagreed with it. The New York Times quoted an administration official "familiar with the reaction of senior officials at the White House and State Department," who called it a "dumb report" that "in no way or shape represents U.S. policy." It was substantially rewritten before it was issued in May 1992. Almost 11 years later, it can be fairly argued that Team B is now running the show.
OK, everybody with me? This is not the first time Cheney, Wolfowitz et al have tried this.
Now, whether it's Mr. Baker's sympathy for the delicate feelings of the middle east or Mr. Baker's lack of sympathy for the delicate feelings of Israel, or Mr. Baker's considerable financial stake in the arab world (he has a great deal of Saudi money invested in Carlyle, which owns rather a lot of oil and defense companies), or merely that he wants to have a region left to make money in, it would be A Very Bad Thing for the current group in power in the White House if he gets his foot in the door in a policy-making position.
Maybe the Post should just sit this one out.
Posted by at July 26, 2003 08:41 PM | TrackBack