Yes, I can't get over James Baker being the chairman of a civil commission on war and statecraft. The first reason is that he is primarily responsible for American policy in the first Bush administration. That policy was a strategic disaster and a moral enormity. On Baker's head rests almost all of the responsibility for Saddam Hussein surviving in power after the first Gulf war. And, given that fact, also responsible for Saddam's atrocities against the Shia and Kurds for which the deposed tyrant is at last being tried in the very context of this war. James Baker is actually an accessory to war crimes of the Iraqi Baath Party in a war fought entirely against civilians. The truth is that he trusted Saddam ... just as he seems to trust Bashar Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be reasonable. If he truly trusts them on anything he is, well, as gullible as Chamberlain. It also boggles the mind that Baker somehow retains a capacity to mold a consensus of even ten Americans, five Democrats, and five Republicans. After all, he was the engineer of the deepest breach of code and conduct in the nation's electoral history. Supercilious, self-righteous, ruthless, he somehow intimidates because his critics sense that he will stop at nothing to defeat his opponents. It was altogether predictable that a Baker commission on Iraq would presume a linkage with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. This has been an insistent trope of Baker's for years. He thinks that what this will achieve is to force Israel into retreat from its own defensive necessities. It has done so before; maybe it will do so once again. But, then, Baker's flimsy architecture will truly collapse. The Arabs of Palestine have not yet accommodated to the idea of Israel. That's the explanation of the Hamas victory in the first "democratic" Palestinian election. In any case, there are no Palestinians with whom to negotiate who can realistically promise anything. Anyway, there is no Palestinian authority even though there is a Palestinian Authority, a facade even more transparent than the Potemkin villages during the reign of Catherine II. Baker has already informed us of what a successful negotiation between Israel and Syria would mean: a return of the Golan Heights to Damascus. Why would this satisfy the Syrians? They launched their war against Israel when they possessed the Heights. It was theirs. I recall a stay at a kibbutz below the Golan against whose fields and farmers Syria constantly shot mortar fire. More important, Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran have grander ambitions than Israel. It is Iraq and the power of the Saudis. Even if Israel were to cooperate with Baker's design for its suicide, nothing that Baker imagines will come to pass. Certainly, the Palestinians won't get a state because their Arab cousins don't really want them to have one. And Iran and Syria will have been persuaded by American weakness that their road to regional hegemony is open ... thanks to James Baker. The best critique I've read of the Baker report--OK, the Baker-Hamilton report--appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. It is by Eliot Cohen, a military strategist and a truly mesmerizing military historian at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Why wasn't he on the commission staff? Precisely because he is brilliant and independent. The model for commission staff was Phebe Marr, like Baker an early and late admirer of the Iraqi genocidalist, about whom you will read in this space in due course. If you want to read my two previous postings about the Iraq Study Group, go here and here.