Suffice to say that I’m no fan of Baker or his realist clan. My soundbite on the matter is that the guy who was responsible for the Taif Accords and the 15 years of Syrian terror that followed in Lebanon and the failure to pursue Saddam, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the 12 years of sanctions that followed that is now in the driver’s seat of our foreign policy.

To be a bit more specific, my gut feeling on the ISG is that both parties are looking for a way out. Bush just wants the Iraq “problem” to be over so the party will be strong in ’08 and the Dems want a way to be able to join the “fight,” so to speak, without having to renounce their bleating about “no war for oil, U.S. troops out now, blah blah blah.”

The Baker plan will offer exactly what everyone is looking for. Talk to Syria and Iran, get them to help shut down the supply lines for the insurgency and help quell the most strident among those advocating sectarian strife (Syria with the Sunnis, Iran with the Shi’ites). Of course, this gives our two biggest adversaries the ability to control the fate of Iraq, but that’s irrelevant. Everyone just wants the Iraq “thing” to be over, so once the sectarian strife is quelled sufficiently, we’ll declare “victory” and withdraw our troops, leaving a half-assed Iraqi security structure to try and defend the government. And when Iran and/or Syria decide to stir up trouble again, we’ll be able to wash our hands of it.

Of course, the sad truth is that if that transpires, it’s a textbook case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory which happens all too often in counter-insurgency actions. All we need to do is to up the number of troops that are training Iraqi security forces and continue to provide logistical and air support and we will eventually “win” in the sense that we can honestly hand the country over to the Iraqi government. In order to do that, though, there needs to be political top cover, which as I’ve pointed out, is severely lacking.