President Bush baffles me. If your whole legacy was riding on Iraq, what would you do? I’d draft the country’s best negotiators — Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, George Shultz, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross or Richard Holbrooke — and ask one or all of them to go to Baghdad, under a U.N. mandate, with the following orders:
I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you’ve reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.
I mean, obviously this is the cartoon version of diplomacy, and I don't usually think that diplomacy is a bad idea. But people in Iraq have minds and memories, too! Some of them don't trust people like Henry Kissinger, Jim Baker, and Richard Holbrooke. Some of them might conceivably think the conclusions reached at meetings between the prop-government and men with...mixed...records in the region were suspect.
No doubt there are better people out there for a job like that. Sadly, I doubt any of them are American, and I doubt any non-American diplomat would at this point agree to stake his reputation on a fiasco this severe when it has no obvious solution.
Tony Blair!
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | July 18, 2007 at 02:05 PM