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From yesterday’s Times:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

Shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!

Given that public discourse in this country seems to be conducted mainly by eight-year-olds, it comes as no surprise that there is this idea that James Baker will magically rescue us from the mess in Iraq.

Starting with the run-up to the invasion, there have been two basic viewpoints in mainstream discussion of the war:

1. Saddam is an evil madman and should be taken down, George W. Bush is the only one who’s man enough to do it, and anyone who says different is a traitor.
2. Getting rid of Saddam is a good idea, but George W. Bush doesn’t have a good plan for doing it.

Until the last few months, #1 got most of the attention. However, as Iraq has spiraled farther down the drain of sectarian violence toward civil war, we hear more and more that the invasion was bungled by the Bush administration. They had no post-war plan; they had a bad post-war plan; we shouldn’t have gotten rid of Saddam’s army; de-Baathification was the wrong thing to do; Don Rumsfeld’s management style was bad; Condoleeza Rice is too weak a Secretary of State; the list goes on.

Hard-core Bush supporters on the Right have their own analogues of this discussion. For them, the explanation for the failure of Bush’s Iraq strategy lies with the Iraqis, who aren’t doing enough to rebuild their country, and/or the American public, who isn’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to spread liberty and Democracy.

This notion that the war in Iraq was a good idea poorly implemented is the foundation of the irrational hopes and expectations being directed at James Baker and the Iraq Study Group. Bush went into Iraq, we are told, but he had no plan to win the peace, no strategy for victory. Now, though, the serious, grown-up policy experts from his father’s generation have come back to clean things up.

Anyone expecting Baker to pull a rabbit out of his magic hat, however, would do well to think about the third view of the Iraq invasion that was and continues to be almost entirely absent from mainstream commentary: that it was a terrible idea that had no chance of working, no matter how well planned.

It is ludicrous to think that if Bush and his crew had been serious, rational foreign policy and military strategists they would have done a better job of planning the invasion and post-war reconstruction. Serious, rational foreign policy and military strategists would never have undertaken the project in the first place. The Iraq Study Group cannot sweep in and fix things, because there is nothing to be fixed—the occupation is going almost exactly how anyone not fogged over with jingoistic war fever could have predicted (and did predict) it would go.

So, for those still clinging to view #2 above, all that’s left is to hope that The Next Thing will be the magic bullet—the turnover of power to the Iraqis, elections, racheting up or down of troop levels, another six months, etc. Maybe the ISG’s recommendations will do the trick, but I doubt it.