The Pentagon Plot :Baker's trip isn't about debt, and the contracts direct

The Pentagon Plot http://slate.msn.com/id/2092440/
Baker's trip isn't about debt, and the contracts directive isn't about money.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, at 3:40 PM PT


A battle was raging within the administration between the unilateralist neocons (mainly in the Pentagon and on Vice President Dick Cheney's staff) and the multilateralist diplomats (mainly in the State Department, with a few supporters on Rice's staff). Baker was seen, by all sides, as a potent tool for the multilateralists. In August 2002, well before even mobilization for the war began, Baker had written an op-ed piece for the New York Times urging Bush not to "go it alone" in confronting Iraq and to "reject the advice of those who counsel doing so." Most people saw the piece as a signal from Bush's father; it is doubtful that Baker, who remains close to the elder Bush, would have submitted it to the Times without at least tacit permission. The following month, the younger Bush—against the advice of Rumsfeld and Cheney—took his case to the United Nations.


What's going on now has all the appearances of a renewal of this power struggle. The hard-liners couldn't stop this Baker mission, so it looks as if they're doing all they can to obstruct it—to create ill will before it's started and thus to minimize not so much Baker's chance of success as what might go with that success: his ascent to power.

The hard-liners want to keep Baker out, in part because he does not share their vision of the world, in part because they know that he is not the subordinate type. He gets involved in a crisis only if he is allowed to control it; and if he controls the Iraqi occupation, the days of the Pentagon's control are finished.

Bush has almost always sided with the hard-liners, but he is above all a political creature, and he must realize that a quagmire in Iraq could bring down his presidency. It may, in fact, be the only issue (assuming the economic recovery continues) that could doom his bid for re-election. He needs a way out—or a way to bring the rest of the world in. Baker is the one man who has the loyalty to the Bush family, the savvy in electoral politics, and the trust of erstwhile allies. He is, in short, the one man who might pull the trick off.

when they wrote that Baker is the consigleri for the BFEE.

the reporter should have replied, "You already did, it's Jim Baker."

"It may, in fact, be the only issue (assuming the economic recovery continues) that could doom his bid for re-election."

Did the economy recover when I wasn't looking? Did all the jobs stop going to India and China? When did all the hiring start? When did the number of personal bankruptcies start to decline. Shoot, was I dreaming or did I imagine that I read that home foreclosures were starting to rise?

Silly me.

radical, even for him. So perhaps there should be a "tiny" sense of gratitude to Poppy for attempting to railroad the PNACers.

Of course, you have to wonder what else Poppy and Baker have up their sleeves as well.

With all that has hit the news these past view days, you can almost see the strings on the puppet boy-king becoming one big tangled mess.