Memories of the Daleks (oops, James Baker)
Jeff Jacoby takes us down memory lane with the architect of the Iraq Study Group:
AS SECRETARY of state from 1989 to 1992, James Baker was involved in some of the worst foreign-policy blunders of the first Bush administration.
One such blunder was the stubborn refusal to support independence for the long-subjugated republics of the Soviet Union, culminating in the president’s notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech urging Ukrainians to stay in their Soviet cage. Another was the appeasement of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad during the run up to the 1991 Gulf War, when Bush and Baker blessed Syria’s brutal occupation of Lebanon in exchange for Assad’s acquiescence in the campaign to undo Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.
When Chinese tanks massacred students in Tiananmen Square, Bush declared: “I don’t think we ought to judge the whole People’s Liberation Army by that terrible incident.” When Bosnia was torn apart by violence in 1992, the Bush-Baker reaction was to shrug it off as “a hiccup.”
Worst of all was the betrayal of the Iraqi Shi’ites and Kurds who heeded Bush’s call to “take matters into their own hands” and overthrow Saddam Hussein — only to be slaughtered by Saddam’s helicopter gunships and napalm while the Bush administration stood by. Baker blithely announced that the administration was “not in the process now of assisting . . . these groups that are in uprising against the current government.”
If Bush the Elder is remembered for a rather heartless and cynical foreign policy, much of the credit must go to Baker.
What he did for the father, Baker is now poised to do for the son.
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