Bush seeks Baker’s help to find a way out of Iraq mess
By Stephen Collinson
WASHINGTON: Shrewd political fixer, Washington insider and Bush family loyalist, James Baker is approaching the crunch-point of his toughest mission yet: finding a way out of the morass in Iraq.
Mr Baker met President George Bush at the White House on Monday along with the panel he co-chairs charged with plotting a new strategy, as the US hope for a democratic Baghdad beachhead in the Muslim world apparently dissolves.
Once a discrete probe by Washington wise men and women, the Iraq Study Group is now in the full political glare, especially given signs Mr Bush may be open to new ideas after last week's Republican election debacle.
Cynics portray Mr Baker as a diplomatic lone ranger, riding in at the behest of former president George Bush to extricate his son, the current president, from a legacy-sapping entanglement in Iraq.
It is a modus operandi familiar to Baker, a 76-year-old Texan, often drafted during the Bush family's most intractable political crises.
In 1992, the elder president Bush pulled Baker back from the State Department to oversee his ultimately doomed re-election campaign.
Eight years later he was back, overseeing the bitter Florida recount drama, which clinched the presidency for the current US leader.
But Baker would likely prefer to be known less as a political hack, than as a statesman, who as secretary of state helped engineer a 'soft landing' in the Cold War, and was renowned for Middle East shuttles culminating in the Madrid peace conference. Though lampooned as a Bush retainer, and hit by whispers over his ego, Baker is also highly regarded in Washington.
“I don't discount the notion that he is also a patriotic individual who would prefer solutions that are less violent and more stabilising, I am not of the school to attribute everything to his ego,” said Rand Beers, a former national security council counter-terrorism advisor.
The impression that the old crowd of foreign policy “realists” is back in business after years being overshadowed by Bush's neo-conservatives, was bolstered by the naming of Robert Gates as defence secretary to replace Donald Rumsfeld.
Mr Gates served as CIA chief under president Bush's father, the 41st US president.
“Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes,” quipped New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Mr Baker's latest mission, as well as recent comments on Iran and Syria, have put him at odds with Bush administration orthodoxy, which rejects talks with many US foes.
“You don't just talk to your friends, and it's not a sign of weakness to talk to somebody,” Mr Baker said on the Imus radio program on MSNBC last month.
“It's not necessarily appeasement provided you do it in the right way and you just don't roll over and give something that you're hard-nosed and tough about it.” Hard talk with US foes has been a Baker speciality -- in the frantic days before the invasion of Iraq in 1991, he held high-stakes negotiations with then Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz designed to avert conflict.
Though he returned to private business life after 2000, Baker was still on call as a diplomatic trouble-shooter.He was personal envoy to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in an inconclusive bid to end the conflict between Morocco and separatist rebels in Western Sahara.
He also served as a Bush emissary on forgiving Iraq's debts, garnering unfavourable headlines in Britain, which alleged his mission conflicted with his business interests.
James A. Baker III was born in Houston, Texas in 1930 and graduated from Princeton University in 1952. After two years of service in the US Marines, Baker went back to the Texas School of Law at Austin to qualify as a lawyer.
He has served four Republican presidents, both Bushes, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
He was treasury secretary from 1985 to 1988 and White House chief of staff from 1981 to 1985 under Reagan, and under secretary of commerce under Ford.
His first wife Mary died from cancer. He and his current wife, Susan, have eight children.—AFP
